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MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
MOSES AND
MONOTHEISM
SIGMUND FREUD
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY
KATHERINE JONES
PUBLISHED BY THE HOGARTH PRESS
AND THE INSTITUTE OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS
'939
First published 1 939
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
THE GARDEN CITY PRESS LIMITED
AT LETGHWORTH, HERTFORDSHIRE
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
PARTS I and II of this book were published in
German in Imago in 1937; Part III has not
previously appeared in print.
I am indebted to Mr. James Strachey and Mr.
Wilfred Trotter for kindly reading through this
translation and for making a number of valuable
suggestions. I have also had the advantage of
consulting the author on some doubtful points.
K.J: '
CONTENTS
PART I
PAGE
MOSES AN EGYPTIAN - - - - n
PART II
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 29
PART III
MOSES, HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC
RELIGION 89
PREFATORY NOTES 89
SECTION I:
1. The Historical Premisses 95
2. Latency Period and Tradition - 107
3. The Analogy - - - 116
4. Application - - - 129
5. Difficulties - - - - 148
8 CONTENTS
PAGE
SECTION II:
1. Summary - - - - - 163
2. The People of Israel - - 166
3. The Great Man - - - 169
4. The Progress in Spirituality - 176
5 . Renunciation versus Gratification 182
6. The Truth in Religion - 193
7. The Return of the Repressed - 197
8. The Historical Truth - - - 201
9. The Historical Development - 207
GLOSSARY 217
INDEX - - - 219
PART I
MOSES AN EGYPTIAN
Part I
MOSES AN EGYPTIAN
To deny a people the man whom it praises as
the greatest of its sons is not a deed to be under-
taken light-heartedly especially by one belong-
ing to that people. No consideration, however,
will move rne to set aside truth in favour
of supposed national interests. Moreover, the
elucidation of the mere facts of the problem may
be expected to deepen our insight into the
situation with which they are concerned.
The man Moses, the liberator of his people, who
gave them their religion and their laws, belonged
to an age so remote that the preliminary question
arises whether he was an historical person or a
legendary figure. If he lived, his time was the
thirteenth or fourteenth century B.C.; we have
no word of him but from the Holy Books and
the written traditions of the Jews. Although
the decision lacks final historical certainty, the
great majority of historians have expressed the
opinion that Moses did live and that the exodus
from Egypt, led by him, did in fact take place.
12 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
It has been maintained with good reason that
the later history of Israel could not be understood
if this were not admitted. Science to-day has
become much more cautious and deals much
more leniently with tradition than it did in the
early days of historical investigation.
What first attracts our interest in the person of
Moses is his name, which is written Mosche in
Hebrew. One may well ask: Where does it
come from ? What does it mean ? As is well
known, the story in Exodus, Chapter ii, already
answers this question. There we learn that the
Egyptian princess who saved the babe from the
waters of the Nile gave him his name, adding the
etymological explanation: because I drew him
out of the water. But this explanation is obviously
inadequate. " The biblical interpretation of the
name ' He that was drawn out of the water 5 "
thus an author of the Judisches Lexikon 1 "is folk
etymology; the active Hebrew form itself of the
name (Mosche can at best mean only ' the
drawer out 5 ) cannot be reconciled with this
solution." This argument can be supported by
two further reflections : first, that it is nonsensical
to credit an Egyptian princess with a knowledge
of Hebrew etymology, and, secondly, that the
water from which the child was drawn was most
probably not the water of the Nile.
1 Judisches Lexikon, founded by Herlitz und Kirschner, Bd. IV,
1930, Jiidischer Verlag, Berlin.
MOSES AN EGYPTIAN 13
On the other hand the suggestion has long been
made and by many different people that the name
Moses derives from the Egyptian vocabulary.
Instead of citing all the authors who have voiced
this opinion I shall quote a passage from a recent
work by Breasted, 1 an author whose History of
Egypt is regarded as authoritative. "It is
important to notice that his name, Moses, was
Egyptian. It is simply the Egyptian word ' mose '
meaning * child/ and is an abridgement of a
fuller form of such names as ' Amen -mose '
meaning c Amon-a-child 5 or ' Ptah-mose, 5 mean-
ing c Ptah -a -child, 5 these forms themselves being
likewise abbreviations for the complete form
* Amon-(has-given)-a child 5 or Ptah -(has -given) -
a -child. 5 The abbreviation ' child 5 early became
a convenient rapid form for the cumbrous full
name, and the name Mose, c child, 5 is not un-
common on the Egyptian monuments. The father
of Moses without doubt prefixed to his son 5 s name
that of an Egyptian god like Amon or Ptah, and
this divine name was gradually lost in current
usage, till the boy was called ' Mose. 5 (The final
s is an addition drawn from the Greek translation
of the Old Testament. It is riot in the Hebrew,
which has ' mosheh 5 ). 55 I have given this
passage literally and am by no means prepared
to share the responsibility for its details. I am
a little surprised, however, that Breasted in
1 The Dawn of Conscience, London, 1934, p. 350.
14 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
citing related names should have passed over the
analogous theophorous names in the list of
Egyptian kings, such as Ah-mose, Thut-mose
(Thothmes) and Ra-mose (Ramses).
It might have been expected that one of the
many authors who recognized Moses to be an
Egyptian name would have drawn the con-
clusion, or at least considered the possibility,
that the bearer of an Egyptian name was himself
an Egyptian. In modern times we have no
misgiving in drawing such conclusions, although
to-day a person bears two names, not one, and
although a change of name or assimilation of it
in new conditions cannot be ruled out. So we
are not at all surprised to find that the poet
Chamisso was of French extraction, Napoleon
Buonaparte on the other hand of Italian, and
that Benjamin Disraeli was an Italian Jew as
his name would lead us to expect. And such an
inference from the name to the race should be
more reliable and indeed conclusive in respect
of early and primitive times. Nevertheless to the
best of my knowledge no historian has drawn this
conclusion in the case of Moses, not even one of
those who, like Breasted, are ready to suppose
that Moses " was cognizant of all the wisdom of
the Egyptians." l
What hindered them from doing so can only
be guessed at. Perhaps the awe of Biblical
1 Loc. cit. 9 p. 334.
MOSES AN EGYPTIAN 15
tradition was insuperable. Perhaps it seemed
monstrous to imagine that the man Moses could
have been anything other than a Hebrew. In
any event, what happened was that the recogni-
tion of the name being Egyptian was not a factor
in judging the origin of the man Moses, and that
nothing further was deduced from it. If the
question of the nationality of this great man is
considered important, then any new material for
answering it must be welcome.
This is what my little essay attempts. It may
claim a place in Imago 1 because the contribution
it brings is an application of psycho-analysis.
The considerations thus reached will impress only
that minority of readers familiar with analytical
reasoning and able to appreciate its conclusions.
To them I hope it will appear of significance.
In 1909 Otto Rank, then still under my influ-
ence, published at my suggestion a book entitled :
Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden. 2 It deals with
the fact " that almost all important civilized
peoples have early on woven myths around and
glorified in poetry their heroes, mythical kings
and princes, founders of religions, of dynasties,
empires and cities in short their national heroes.
Especially the history of their birth and of their
early years is furnished with phantastic traits;
1 See Glossary.
2 Funftes Heft der Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde, Fr.
Deuticke, Wien. It is far from my mind to depreciate the value
of Rank's original contributions to this work.
1 6 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
the amazing similarity, nay, literal identity, of
those tales, even if they refer to different, com-
pletely independent peoples, sometimes geo-
graphically far removed from one another, is well
known and has struck many an investigator. 55
Following Rank we reconstruct on the lines of
Galton's technique an "^average myth 55 that
makes prominent the essential features of all these
tales, and we then get this formula.
" The hero is the son of parents of the highest
station, most often the son of a king.
" His conception is impeded by difficuJties,
such as abstinence or temporary sterility; or else
his parents practise intercourse in secret because
of prohibitions or other external obstacles. During
his mothers pregnancy or earlier an oracle or a
dream warns the father of the child 5 s birth as
containing grave danger for his safety.
" In consequence the father (or a person
representing him) gives orders for the new-born
babe to be killed or exposed to extreme danger;
in most cases the babe is placed in a casket and
delivered to the waves.
" The child is then saved by animals or poor
people, such as shepherds, and suckled by a
female animal or a woman of humble birth.
" When full grown he rediscovers his noble
parents after many strange adventures, wreaks
vengeance on his father and, recognized by his
people, attains fame and greatness. 55
MOSES AN EGYPTIAN 1 7
The most remote of the historical personages
to whom this myth attaches is Sargon of Agade,
the founder of Babylon about 2800 B.C. From the
point of view of what interests us here it would
perhaps be worth while to reproduce the account
ascribed to himself:
" I am Sargon, the mighty king, King of
Agade. My mother was a Vestal; my father I
knew not; while my father's brother dwelt in
the mountains. In my town Azupirani it lies
on the banks of Euphrates my mother, the
Vestal, conceived me. Secretly she bore me. She laid
me in a basket of sedge, closed the opening with
pitch and lowered me into the river. The stream did
not drown me, but carried me to Akki, the
drawer of water. Akki, the drawer of water, in
the goodness of his heart lifted me out of the
water. Akki, the drawer of water, as his own son he
brought me up. Akki, the drawer of water, made
me his gardener. When I was a gardener Istar
fell in love with me. I became king and for forty-
five years I ruled as king. 5 '
The best known names in the series beginning
with Sargon of Agade are Moses, Cyrus and
Romulus. But besides these Rank has enumerated
many other heroes belonging to myth or poetry
to whom the same youthful story attaches either
in its entirety or in well recognizable parts, such as
(Edipus, Kama, Paris, Telephos, Perseus, Heracles,
Gilgamesh, Amphion, Zethos and others.
B
1 8 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
The source and the tendency of such myths are
familiar to us through Rank's work. I need only
refer to his conclusions with a few short hints.
A hero is a man who stands up manfully against
his father and in the end victoriously overcomes
him. The myth in question traces this struggle
back to the very dawn of the hero's life, by having
him born against his father's will and saved in
spite of his father's evil intentions. The exposure
in the basket is clearly a symbolical representa-
tion of birth ; the basket is the womb, the stream
the water at birth. In innumerable dreams the
relation of the child to the parents is represented
by drawing or saving from the water. When the
imagination of a people attaches this myth to a
famous personage it is to indicate that he is
recognized as a hero, that his life has conformed
to the typical plan. The inner source of the myth
is the so-called " family romance " of the child,
in which the son reacts to the change in his inner
relationship to his parents, especially that to his
father. The child's first years are governed by
grandiose over-estimation of his father; kings
and queens in dreams and fairy tales always
represent, accordingly, the parents. Later on,
under the influence of rivalry and real disappoint-
ments, the release from the parents and a critical
attitude towards the father sets in. The two
families of the myth, the noble as well as the
humble one, are therefore both images of his own
MOSES AN EGYPTIAN 1 9
family as they appear to the child in successive
periods of his life.
It is not too much to say that these observations
fully explain the similarity as well as the far-
spread occurrence of the myth of the birth of the
hero. It is all the more interesting to find that
the myth of Moses 5 birth and exposure stands
apart; in one essential point it even contradicts
the others.
We start with the two families between which
the myth has cast the child's fate. We know that
analytic interpretation makes them into one
family, that the distinction is only a temporal
one. In the typical form of the myth the first
family, into which the child is born, is a noble and
mostly a royal one; the second family, in which
the child grows up, is a humble and degraded
one, corresponding with the circumstances to
which the interpretation refers. Only in the
story of (Edipus is this difference obscured. The
babe exposed by one kingly family is brought up
by another royal pair. It can hardly be an
accident that in this one example there is in the
myth itself a glimmer of the original identity of
the two families. The social contrast of the two
families meant, as we know, to stress the heroic
nature of a great man gives a second function
to our myth, which becomes especially significant
with historical personages. It can also be used
to provide for our hero a patent of nobility to
2O MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
elevate him to a higher social rank. Thus Cyrus
is for the Medes an alien conqueror; by way of
the exposure myth he becomes the grandson of
their king. A similar trait occurs in the myth of
Romulus : if such a man ever lived he must have
been an unknown adventurer, an upstart; the
myth makes him a descendant of, and heir to,
the royal house of Alba Longa.
It is very different in the case of Moses. Here
the first family usually so distinguished is
modest enough. ^He is the child of Jewish
Leyites. But the second family the humble one
in which as a rule heroes are brought up is
replaced by the Royal house of Egypt; the
princess brings him up as her own son. This
divergence from the usual type has struck many
research workers as strange. E. Meyer and others
after him supposed the original form of the myth
to have been different. Pharaoh had been warned
by a prophetic dream 1 that his daughter's son
would become a danger to him and his kingdom.
This is why he has the child delivered to the
waters of the Nile shortly after his birth. But the
child is saved by Jewish people and brought up
as their own. " National motives " in Rank's
terminology 2 had transformed the myth into the
form now known by us.
However, further thought tells us that an
1 Also mentioned in Flavius Josephus's narration.
2 Loc. tit., p. 80, footnote.
MOSES AN EGYPTIAN 21
original Moses myth of this kind, one not diverg-
ing from other birth myths, could not have
existed. For the legend is either of Egyptian or
of Jewish origin. The first supposition may be
excluded. The Egyptians had no motive to
glorify Moses; to them he was not a hero. So
the legend should have originated among the
Jewish people; that is to say, it was attached in
the usual version to the person of their leader.
But for that purpose it was entirely unfitted;
what good is a legend to a people that makes
their hero into an alien ?
The Moses myth as we know it to-day lags
sadly behind its secret motives. If Moses is not
of royal lineage our legend cannot make him into
a hero ; if he remains a Jew it has done nothing
to raise his status. Only one small feature of the
whole myth remains effective : the assurance that
the babe survived in spite of strong outside forces
to the contrary. This feature is repeated in the
early history of Jesus, where King Herod assumes
the role of Pharaoh. So we really have a right
to assume that in a later and rather clumsy
treatment of the legendary material the adapter
saw fit to equip his hero Moses with certain
features appertaining to the classical exposure
myths characteristic of a hero, and yet unsuited
to Moses by reason of the special circumstances.
With this unsatisfactory and even uncertain
result our investigation would have to end,
22 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
without having contributed anything to answering
the" question whether Moses was Egyptian, were
there not another and perhaps more successful
way of approaching the exposure myth itself.
Let us return to the two families in the myth.
As we know, on the level of analytic interpreta-
tion they are identical. On a mythical level they
are distinguished as the noble and the humble
family. With an historical person to whom the
myth has become attached there is, however, a
third level, that of reality. One of the families is
the real one, the one into which the great man
was really born and in which he was brought up.
The other is fictitious, invented by the myth in
pursuance of its own motives. As a rule the real
family corresponds with the humble one, the
noble family with the fictitious one. In the case
of Moses something seemed to be different. And
here the new point of view may perhaps bring
some illumination. It is that the first family,
the one from which the babe is exposed to danger,
is in all comparable cases the fictitious one; the
second family, however, by which the hero is
adopted and in which he grows up is his real one.
If we have the courage to accept this statement
as a general truth to which the Moses legend also
is subject, then we suddenly see our way clear.
Moses is an Egyptian probably of noble origin
whom the myth undertakes to transform into a
Jew. And that would be our conclusion! The
MOSES AN EGYPTIAN 23
exposure in the water was in its right place; to
fit the new conclusion the intention had to be
changed, not without violence. From a means of
getting rid of the child it becomes a means of its
salvation.
The divergence of the Moses legend from all
others of its kind might be traced back to a
special feature in the story of Moses 5 life. Whereas
in all other cases the hero rises above his humble
beginnings as his life progresses, the heroic life
of the man Moses began by descending from
his eminence to the level of the children of
Israel.
This little investigation was undertaken in the
hope of gaining from it a second, fresh argument
for the suggestion that Moses was an Egyptian.
We have seen that the first argument, that of his
name, has not been considered decisive. 1 We
have to be prepared for the new reasoning the
analysis of the exposure myth not faring any
better. The objection is likely to be that the
circumstances of the origin and transformation of
legends are too obscure to allow of such a con-
clusion as the preceding one, and that all efforts
to extract the kernel of historical truth must be
1 Thus E. Meyer in Die Mosessagen und die Leviten, Berliner
Sitzber. 1905: " The name Mose is probably the name Pinchas in
the priest dynasty of Silo . . . without a doubt Egyptian. This
does not prove however that these dynasties were of Egyptian
origin, but it proves that they had relations with Egypt." (p. 651 .)
One may well ask what kind of relations one is to imagine.
24 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
doomed to failure in face of the incoherence and
contradictions clustering around the heroic person
of Moses and the unmistakable signs of tenden-
tious distortion and stratification accumulated
through many centuries. I myself do not share
this negative attitude, but I am not in a position
to confute it.
If there was no more certainty than this to be
attained why have I brought this enquiry to the
notice of a wider public ? I regret that even my
justification has to restrict itself to hints. If,
however, one is attracted by the two arguments
outlined above, and tries to take seriously the
conclusion that Moses was a distinguished
Egyptian, then very interesting and far-reaching
perspectives open out. With the help of certain
assumptions the motives guiding Moses in his
unusual undertaking can be made intelligible;
in close connection with this the possible motiva-
tion of numerous characteristics and peculiarities
of the legislation and religion he gave the Jewish
people can be perceived. It stimulates ideas of
some moment concerning the origin of mono-
theistic religion in general. But such important
considerations cannot be based on psychological
probabilities alone. Even if one were to accept it
as historical that Moses was Egyptian, we should
want at least one other fixed point so as to protect
the many emerging possibilities from the reproach
of their being products of imagination and too
MOSES AN EGYPTIAN 25
far removed from reality. An objective proof of
the period into which the life of Moses, and with
it the exodus from Egypt, fall would perhaps have
sufficed. But this has not been forthcoming, and
therefore it will be better to suppress any infer-
ences that might follow our view that Moses was
an Egyptian.
PART II
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN
Part II
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN . . .
IN Part I of this book I have tried to
strengthen by a new argument the suggestion that
the man Moses, the liberator and law-giver of
the Jewish people, was not a Jew, but an Egypt-
ian. That his name derived from the Egyptian
vocabulary had long been observed, though not
duly appreciated. I added to this consideration
the further one that the interpretation of the
exposure myth attaching to Moses necessitated
the conclusion that he was an Egyptian whom a
people needed to make into a Jew.VAt the end of
my essay I said that important and far-reaching
conclusions could be drawn from the suggestion
that Moses was an Egyptian; but I was not
prepared to uphold them publicly, since they were
based only on psychological probabilities and
lacked objective proof. The more significant the
possibilities thus discerned the more cautious is
one about exposing them to the critical attack of
the outside world without any secure foundation
like an iron monument with feet of clay. No
29
30 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
probability, however seductive, can protect us
from error; even if all parts of a problem seem
to fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,
one has to remember that the probable need not
necessarily be the truth and the truth not always
probable. And, lastly, it is not attractive to be
classed with the scholastics and talmudists who
are satisfied to exercise their ingenuity uncon-
cerned how far removed their conclusions may
be from the truth.
Notwithstanding these misgivings, which weigh
as heavily to-day as they did then, out of the
conflict of my motives the decision has emerged
to follow up my first essay by this contribution.
But once again it is only a part of the whole, and
not the most important part.
If, then, Moses was an Egyptian, the first gain
from this suggestion is a new riddle, one difficult
to answer. When a people of a tribe 1 prepares
for a great undertaking it is to be expected that
one of them should make himself their leader or
be chosen for this role. But what could have
induced a distinguished Egyptian perhaps a
prince, priest or high official to place himself at
1 We have no inkling what numbers were concerned in the
Exodus.
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 31
the head of a throng of culturally inferior immi-
grants, and to leave the country with them, is
not easy to conjecture. The well-known contempt
of the Egyptians for foreigners makes such a
proceeding especially unlikely. Indeed, I am
inclined to think this is why even those historians
who recognized the name as Egyptian, and
ascribed all the wisdom of Egypt to him, were not
willing to entertain the obvious possibility that
Moses was an Egyptian.
This first difficulty is followed by a second. We
must not forget that Moses was not only the
political leader of the Jews settled in Egypt, he
was also their law -giver and educator and the
man who forced them to adopt a new religion,
which is still to-day called Mosaic after him.
But can a single person create a new religion so
easily ? And when someone wishes to influence
the religion of another would not the most
natural thing be to convert him to his own ?
The Jewish people in Egypt were certainly
not without some kind of religion, and if
Moses, who gave them a new religion, was an
Egyptian, then the surmise cannot be rejected
that this other new religion was the Egyptian
one.
This possibility encounters an obstacle: the
sharp contrast between the Jewish religion
attributed to Moses and the Egyptian one.
The former is a grandiosely rigid monotheism.
32 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
There is only one God, unique, omnipotent,
unapproachable. The sight of his countenance
cannot be borne; one must not make an image
of him, not even breathe his name. In the
Egyptian religion, on the other hand, there is
a bewildering mass of deities of differing impor-
tance and provenance. Some of them are per-
sonifications of great natural powers like heaven
and earth, sun and moon. Then we find an
abstraction such as Maat (Justice, Truth) or a
grotesque creature like the dwarfish Bes. Most
of them, however, are local gods from the time
when the land was divided into numerous
provinces. They have the shapes of animals as
if they had not yet overcome their origin from
the old totem animals. They are not clearly
differentiated, barely distinguished by special
functions attributed to some of them. The hymns
in praise of these gods tell the same thing about
each of them, identify them with one another
without any misgivings in a way that would
confuse us hopelessly. Names of deities are
combined with one another, so that one becomes
degraded almost to an epithet of the other. Thus
in the best period of the " New Empire " the
main god of the city of Thebes is called Amon-Re
in which combination the first part signifies the
ram-headed city-god, whereas Re is the name of
the hawk -headed Sun -God of On. Magic and
ceremonial, amulets and formulas, dominated
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 33
the service of these gods, as they did the daily
life of the Egyptians.
Some of these differences may easily derive
from the contrast in principle between a strict
monotheism and an unlimited polytheism. Others
are obviously consequences of a difference in
intellectual level; one religion is very near to the
primitive, the other has soared to the heights of
sublime abstraction. Perhaps it is these two
characteristics that occasionally give one the
impression that the contrast between the Mosaic
and the Egyptian religion is one intended and
purposely accentuated: for example, when the
one religion severely condemns any kind of
magic or sorcery which flourishes so abundantly
in the other ; or when the insatiable zest of the
Egyptian for making images of his gods in clay,
stone and metal, to which our museums owe so
much, is contrasted with the way in which the
making of the image of any living or visionary
being is bluntly forbidden.
There is yet another difference between the
two religions, which the explanations we have
attempted do not touch. No other people of
antiquity has done so much to deny death, has
made such careful provision for an after-life; in
accordance with this the death -god Osiris, the
ruler of that other world, was the mosj; popular
and indisputable of all Egyptian gods.^The early
Jewish religion, on the other hand, had entirely
34 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
relinquished immortality; the possibility of an
existence after death was never mentioned in any
place. And this is all the more remarkable since
later experience has shown that the belief in a
life beyond can very well be reconciled with a
monotheistic religion.
We had hoped the suggestion that Moses was
an Egyptian would prove enlightening and
stimulating in many different respects. But our
first deduction from this suggestion that the new
religion he gave the Jews was his own, the
Egyptian one has foundered on the difference,
nay the striking contrast, between the two
religions.
II
A strange fact in the history of the Egyptian
religion, which was recognized and appraised
relatively late, opens up another point of view.
It is still possible that the religion Moses gave to
his Jewish people was yet his own, an Egyptian
religion though not the Egyptian one.
In the glorious Eighteenth Dynasty, when
Egypt became for the first time a world power,
a young Pharaoh ascended the throne about
1 375 B.C., who first called himself Amenhotep (IV)
like his father, but later on changed his name
and not only his name. This king undertook
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 35
to force upon his subjects a new religion, one
contrary to their ancient traditions and to all
their familiar habitsXIt was a strict monotheisn*,
the first attempt of its kind in the history of the
world as far as we know and religious intoler-
ance, which was foreign to antiquity before this
and for long after, was inevitably born with the
belief in one God. But Amenhotep's reign lasted
only for seventeen years; very soon after his
death in 1358 the new religion was swept away
and the memory of the heretic king proscribed.
From the ruins of his new capital which he had
built and dedicated to his God, and from the
inscriptions in the rock tombs belonging to it, we
derive the little knowledge we possess of him.
Everything we can learn about this remarkable,
indeed unique, person is worthy of the greatest
interest. 1
Everything new must have its roots in what was
before. The origin of Egyptian monotheism can
be traced back a fair distance with some cer-
tainty. 1 In the School of the Priests in the Sun
Temple at On (Heliopolis) tendencies had for
some time been at work developing the idea of an
universal God and stressing His ethical aspects.
Maat, the Goddess of truth, order and justice,
was a daughter of the Sun God Re. Already
1 Breasted called him " The first individual in human history."
2 The account I give here follows closely J. H. Breasted's History
of Egypt, 1906, and The Dawn of Conscience, 1936, and the corre-
sponding sections in the Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. II.
36 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
under Amenhotep III, the father and predecessor
of the reformer, the worship of the Sun God was
in the ascendant, probably in opposition to the
worship of Amon of Thebes, who had become
over prominent. An ancient name of the Sun-
God Aton or Atum was rediscovered, and in this
Aton religion the young king found a movement
he had no need to create, but one which he could
join.
Political conditions in Egypt had about that
time begun to exert a lasting influence on
Egyptian religion. Through the victorious sword
of the great conqueror Thothmes III Egypt had
become a world power. Nubia in the south,
Palestine, Syria and a part of Mesopotamia in
the north had been added to the Empire. This
imperialism was reflected in religion as Universal-
ity and Monotheism. Since Pharaoh's solicitude
now extended beyond Egypt to Nubia and Syria,
Deity itself had to give up its national limitation
and the new God of the Egyptians had to become
like Pharaoh the unique and unlimited sovereign
of the world known to the Egyptians. Besides,
it was natural that as the frontiers extended
Egypt should become accessible to foreign
influences ; some of the king's wives were Asiatic
princesses, 1 and possibly even direct encourage-
ment of monotheism had penetrated from
Syria.
1 Perhaps even Amenhotep's beloved spouse Nofertete.
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 37
Amenhotep never denied his accession to the
Sun Cult of On. In the two hymns to Aton, which
have been preserved to us through the inscriptions
in the rock tombs and were probably composed
by him, he praises the sun as the creator and
preserver of all living beings in and outside
Egypt with a fervour such as recurs many
centuries after only in the psalms in honour of
the Jewish god Jahve. But he did not stop at this
astonishing anticipation of scientific knowledge
concerning the effect of sunlight. There is no
doubt that he went further: that he worshipped
the sun not as a material object, but as a symbol
of a Divine Being whose energy was manifested
in his rays. 1
But we do scant justice to the king if we see in
him only the adherent and protector of an Aton
religion which had already existed before him.
His activity was much more energetic. He added
the something new that turned into monotheism
the doctrine of an universal god : the quality of
exclusiveness. In one of his hymns it is stated in
1 Breasted, History of Egypt, p. 360: " But however evident the
Heliopolitan origin of the new state religion might be, it was not
merely sun-worship; the word Aton was employed in the place
of the old word for ' god ' (nuter), and the god is clearly dis-
tinguished from the material sun." " It is evident that what the
king was deifying was the force by which the Sun made itself
felt on earth " (Dawn of Conscience, p. 279). Erman's opinion of a
formula in honour of the god is similar : A. Erman (Die JEgyptische
Religion, 1905). " There are . . . words which are meant to
express in an abstract form the fact that not the star itself was
worshipped, but the Being that manifested itself in it."
38 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
so many words: " Oh, Thou only God! There
is no other God than Thou. 55 1 And we must not
forget that to appraise the new doctrine it is not
enough to know its positive content only; nearly
as important is its negative side, the knowledge of
what it repudiates. It would be a mistake, too,
to suppose that the new religion sprang to life
ready and fully equipped like Athene out of
Zeus 5 forehead. Everything rather goes to show
that during Amenhotep's reign it was strength-
ened so as to attain greater clarity, consistency,
harshness and intolerance. Probably this develop-
ment took place under the influence of the violent
opposition among the priests of Amon that raised
its head against the reforms of the king. In the
sixth year of Amenhotep's reign this enmity had
grown to such an extent that the king changed
his name, of which the now proscribed name of
the god Amon was a part. Instead of Amenhotep
he called himself Ikhnaton. 2 But not only from
his name did he eliminate that of the hated God,
but also from all inscriptions and even where he
found it in his father's name Amenhotep III.
Soon after his change of name Ikhnaton left
Thebes, which was under Amon's rule, and built
a new capital lower down the river which he
1 Idem, History of Egypt, p. 374.
2 I follow Breasted's (American) spelling in this name (the
accepted English spelling is Akhenaten). The king's new name
means approximately the same as his former one : God is satisfied.
Compare our Godfrey and the German Gotthold.
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 39
called Akhetaton (Horizon of Aton). Its ruins
are now called Tell-el-Amarna. 1
The persecution by the king was directed fore-
most against Amon, but not against him alone.
Everywhere in the Empire the temples were
closed, the services forbidden, and the ecclesias-
tical property seized. Indeed, the king's zeal
went so far as to cause an inquiry to be made into
the inscriptions of old monuments in order to
efface the word " God " whenever it was used
in the plural. 2 It is not to be wondered at that
these orders produced a reaction of fanatical
vengeance among the suppressed priests and the
discontented people, a reaction which was able
to find a free outlet after the king's death. The
Aton religion had not appealed to the people;
it had probably been limited to a small circle
round Ikhnaton's person. His end is wrapped in
mystery. We learn of a few short-lived, shadowy
successors of his own family. Already his son-in-
law Tutankhaton was forced to return to Thebes
and to substitute Amon in his name for the god
Aton. Then there followed a period of anarchy,
until the general Haremhab succeeded in 1350
in restoring order. The glorious Eighteenth
Dynasty was extinguished; at the same time their
1 This is where in 1887 the correspondence of the Egyptian
kings with their friends and vassals in Asia was found, a cor-
respondence which proved so important for our knowledge of
history.
2 Idem, History of Egypt, p. 363.
40 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
conquests in Nubia and Asia were lost. In this
sad interregnum Egypt's old religions had
been reinstated. The Aton religion was at
an end, Ikhnaton's capital lay destroyed and
plundered, and his memory was scorned as that
of a felon.
It will serve a certain purpose if we now note
several negative characteristics of the Aton
religion. In the first place, all myth, magic and
sorcery are excluded from it. 1
Then there is the way in which the Sun God is
represented: no longer as in earlier times by a
small pyramid and a falcon, but and this is
almost rational by a round disc from which
emanate rays terminating in human hands. In
spite of all the love for art in the Amarna period,
not one personal representation of the Sun God
Aton has been found, and, we may say with
confidence, ever will be found. 2
Finally, there is a complete silence about
the death god Osiris and the realm of the
dead. Neither hymns nor inscriptions on graves
1 Weigall (The Life and Times of Akhnaton, 1923, p. 121) says that
Ikhnaton would not recognize a hell against the terrors of which
one had to guard by innumerable magic spells. " Akhnaton flung
all these formulas into the fire. Djins, bogies, spirits, monsters,
demigods and Osiris himself with all his court, were swept into
the blaze and reduced to ashes."
8 A. Weigall, I.e., p. 103, " Akhnaton did not permit any
graven image to be made of the Aton. The true God, said the
king, had no form; and he held to this opinion throughout his
life."
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 41
know anything of what was perhaps nearest
to the Egyptian's heart. The contrast with the
popular religion cannot be expressed more
vividly. 1
Ill
We venture now to draw the following con-
clusion: if Moses was an Egyptian and if he
transmitted to the Jews his own religion then it
was that of Ikhnaton, the Aton religion.
We compared earlier the Jewish religion with
the religion of the Egyptian people and noted
how different they were from each other. Now
we shall compare the Jewish with the Aton
religion and should expect to find that they were
originally identical. We know that this is no easy
task. Of the Aton religion we do not perhaps
know enough, thanks to the revengeful spirit of
the Amon priests. The Mosaic religion we know
only in its final form as it was fixed by Jewish
priests in the time after the Exile about 800 years
later. If, in spite of this unpromising material,
we should find some indications fitting in with
our supposition then we may indeed value them
highly.
1 Erman, /.., p. 90: " Of Osiris and his realm no more was to
be heard." Breasted, Dawn of Conscience, p. 291: "Osiris is
completely ignored. He is never mentioned in any record of
Ikhnaton or in any of the tombs at Amarna."
42 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
There would be a short way of proving our
thesis that the Mosaic religion is nothing else
but that of Aton, namely, by a confession of
faith, a proclamation. But I am afraid I should
be told that such a road is impracticable. The
Jewish creed, as is well known, says: " Schema
Jisroel Adonai Elohenu Adonai Echod." If the
similarity of the name of the Egyptian Aton (or
Atum) to the Hebrew word Adonai and the
Syrian divine name Adonis is not a mere accident,
but is the result of a primaeval unity in language
and meaning, then one could translate the
Jewish formula: Hear, oh Israel, our god Aton
(Adonai) is the only God. I am, alas, entirely
unqualified to answer this question and have
been able to find very little about it in the
literature concerned, 1 but probably we had
better not make things so simple. Moreover, we
shall have to come back to the problems of the
divine name.
The points of similarity as well as those of
difference in the two religions are easily discerned,
but do not enlighten us much. Both are forms of
a strict monotheism, and we shall be inclined to
reduce to this basic character what is similar in
both of them. 'Jewish monotheism is in some
1 Only a few passages in Weigall, I.e., pp. 12, 19: " The god
Atum, who described Re as the setting sun, was perhaps of the
same origin as Aton, generally venerated in Northern Syria. A
foreign Queen, as well as her suite, might therefore have been
attracted to Heliopolis rather than to Thebes."
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 43
points even more uncompromising than the
Egyptian, for example, when it forbids all visual
representation of its God. The most essential
difference apart from the name of their God
is that the Jewish religion entirely relinquishes
the worship of the sun, to which the Egyptian one
still adhered. When comparing the Jewish with
the Egyptian folk religion we received the
impression that, besides the contrast in principle,
there was in the difference between the two
religions an element of purposive contradiction.
This impression appears justified when in our
comparison we replace the Jewish religion by that
of Aton, which Ikhnaton as we know developed
in deliberate antagonism to the popular religion.
We were astonished and rightly so that the
Jewish religion did not speak of anything beyond
the grave, for such a doctrine is reconcilable with
the strictest monotheism. This astonishment
disappears if we go back from the Jewish religion
to the Aton religion and surmise that this feature
was taken over from the latter, since for Ikhnaton
it was a necessity in fighting the popular religion
where the death god Osiris played perhaps a
greater part than any god of the upper regions.
The agreement of the Jewish religion with that of
Aton in this important point is the first strong
argument in favour of our thesis. We shall see
that it is not the only one.
Moses gave the Jews not only a new religion;
44 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
it is equally certain that he introduced the custom
of circumcision. This has a decisive importance
for our problem and it has hardly ever been
weighed. The Biblical account, it is true, often
contradicts it. On the one hand, it dates the
custom back to the time of the patriarchs as a
sign of the covenant concluded between God and
Abraham. On the other hand, the text mentions
in a specially obscure passage that God was
wroth with Moses because he had neglected this
holy usage and proposed to slay him as a punish-
ment; Moses' wife, aMidianite, saved her husband
from the wrath of God by speedily performing
the operation. These are distortions, however,
which should not lead us astray; we shall explore
their motives presently. The fact remains that
the question concerning the origin of circumcision
has only one answer: it comes from Egypt.
Herodotus, " the Father of History, 55 tells us that
the custom of circumcision had long been
practised in Egypt, and his statement has been
confirmed by the examination of mummies and
even by drawings on the walls of graves. No
other people of the Eastern Mediterranean has
as far as we know followed this custom; we can
assume with certainty that the Semites, Baby-
lonians and Sumerians were not circumcised.
Biblical history itself says as much of the inhabi-
tants of Canaan; it is presupposed in the story
of the adventure between Jacob 5 s daughter and
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 45
the Prince of Shechem. 1 The possibility that the
Jews in Egypt adopted the usage of circumcision
in any other way than in connection with the
religion Moses gave them may be rejected as
quite untenable. Now let us bear in mind that
circumcision was practised in Egypt by the
people as a general custom, and let us adopt for
the moment the usual assumption that Moses was
a Jew who wanted to free his compatriots from
the service of an Egyptian overlord, and lead them
out of the country to develop an independent
and self-confident existence a feat he actually
achieved. What sense could there be in his
forcing upon them at the same time a burden-
some custom which, so to speak, made them into
Egyptians and was bound to keep awake their
memory of Egypt, whereas his intention could
only have had the opposite aim, namely, that his
people should become strangers to the country
of bondage and overcome the longing for the
" fleshpots of Egypt " ? No, the fact we started
1 When I use Biblical tradition here in such an autocratic and
arbitrary way, draw on it for confirmation whenever it is con-
venient and dismiss its evidence without scruple when it contra-
dicts my conclusions, I know full well that I am exposing myself
to severe criticism concerning my method and that I weaken the
force of my proofs. But this is the only way in which to treat
material whose trustworthiness as we know for certain was
seriously damaged by the influence of distorting tendencies.
Some justification will be forthcoming later, it is hoped, when we
have unearthed those secret motives. Certainty is not to be gained
in any case, and, moreover, we may say that all other authors
have acted likewise.
46 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
from and the suggestion we added to it are so
incompatible with each other that we venture to
draw the following conclusion: If Moses gave
the Jews not only a new religion, but also the
law of circumcision, he was no Jew but an
Egyptian, and then the Mosaic religion was
probably an Egyptian one, namely because of
its contrast to the popular religion that of Aton
with which the Jewish one shows agreement in
some remarkable points.
As I remarked earlier, my hypothesis that
Moses was not a Jew but an Egyptian creates a
new enigma. What he did easily understand-
able if he were a Jew becomes unintelligible in
an Egyptian. But if we place Moses in Ikhnaton's
period and associate him with that Pharaoh,
then the enigma is resolved and a possible motive
presents itself, answering all our questions. Let
us assume that Moses was a noble and distin-
guished man: perhaps indeed a member of the
royal house, as the myth has it. He must have
been conscious of his great abilities, ambitious
and energetic; perhaps he saw himself in a dim
future as the leader of his people, the governor
of the Empire. In close contact with Pharaoh he
was a convinced adherent of the new religion,
whose basic principles he fully understood and
had made his own. With the king's death and
the subsequent reaction he saw all his hopes and
prospects destroyed. If he was not to recant the
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 47
convictions so dear to him then Egypt had no
more to give him; he had lost his native country.
In this hour of need he found an unusual solution.
The dreamer Ikhnaton had estranged himself
from his people, had let his world empire crumble.
Moses 5 active nature conceived the plan of found-
ing a new empire, of finding a new people, to
whom he could give the religion that Egypt
disdained. It was, as we perceive, an heroic
attempt to struggle against his fate, to find com-
pensation in two directions for the losses he had
suffered through Ikhnaton's catastrophe. Perhaps
he was at the time governor of that border
province (Gosen) in which perhaps already in
" the Hyksos period " certain Semitic tribes had
settled. These he chose to be his new people.
An historic decision. 1
He established relations with them, placed
himself at their head and directed the Exodus
" by strength of hand." In full contradistinction
to the Biblical tradition we may suppose this
Exodus to have passed off peacefully and without
pursuit. The authority of Moses made it possible,
1 If Moses were a high official we can understand his being
fitted for the r61e of leader he assumed with the Jews. If he were
a priest the thought of giving his people a new religion must have
been near to his heart. In both cases he would have continued his
former profession. A prince of royal lineage might easily have
been both : governor and priest. In the report of Flavius Josephus
(Antiqu. jud.) , who accepts the exposure myth, but seems to know
other traditions than the Biblical one, Moses appears as an
Egyptian field -marshal in a victorious campaign in Ethiopia.
48 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
and there was then no central power that could
have prevented it.
According to our construction the Exodus from
Egypt would have taken place between 1358 and
1350, that is to say, after the death of Ikhnaton
and before the restitution of the authority of the
state by Haremhab. 1 The goal of the wandering
could only be Canaan. After the supremacy of
Egypt had collapsed, hordes of war -like Arameans
had flooded the country, conquering and pillag-
ing, and thus had shown where a capable people
could seize new land. We know these warriors
from the letters which were found in 1887 in the
archives of the ruined city of Amarna. There
they are called Habiru, and the name was passed
on no one knows how to the Jewish invaders,
Hebrews, who came later and could not have
been referred to in the letters of Amarna. The
tribes who were the most nearly related to the
Jews now leaving Egypt also lived south of
Palestine in Canaan.
The motivation that we have surmised for the
Exodus as a whole covers also the institution of
circumcision. We know in what manner human
beings both peoples and individuals react to
this ancient custom, scarcely any longer under-
stood. Those who do not practise it regard it as
1 This would be about a century earlier than most historians
assume, who place it in the Nineteenth Dynasty under Merneptah :
or perhaps a little less, for official records seem to include the
interregnum in Haremhab's reign.
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 49
very odd and find it rather abhorrent; but those
who have adopted circumcision are proud of the
custom. They feel superior, ennobled, and look
down with contempt at the others, who appear
to them unclean. Even to-day the Turk hurls
abuse at the Christian by calling him "an un-
circumcised dog. 55 It is credible that Moses, who
as an Egyptian was himself circumcised, shared
this attitude. The Jews with whom he left his
native country were to be a better substitute for
the Egyptians he left behind. In no circum-
stances must they be inferior to them. He wished
to make of them a " Holy People 55 so it is
explicitly stated in the Biblical text and as a
sign of their dedication he introduced the custom
that made them at least the equals of the Egypt-
ians. It would, further, be welcome to him if
such a custom isolated them and prevented them
from mingling with the other foreign peoples they
would meet during their wanderings, just as the
Egyptians had kept apart from all foreigners. 1
1 Herodotus, who visited Egypt about 450 B.C., gives in the
account of his travels a characteristic of the Egyptians which
shows an astounding similarity with well-known features of the
later Jewish people. " They are in all respects much more pious
than other peoples, they are also distinguished from them by many
of their customs, such as circumcision, which for reasons of
cleanliness they introduced before others; further, by their
horror of swine, doubtless connected with the fact that Set wounded
Horus when in the guise of a black hog; and, lastly, most of all by
their reverence for cows, which they would never eat or sacrifice
because they would thereby offend the cow -horned Isis. There-
fore no Egyptian man or woman would ever kiss a Greek or use
D
50 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
Jewish tradition, however, behaved later on as
if it were oppressed by the sequence of ideas we
have just developed. To admit that circumcision
was an Egyptian custom introduced by Moses
would be almost to recognize that the religion
handed down to them from Moses was also
Egyptian. But the Jews had good reasons to
deny this fact; therefore the truth about circum-
cision had also to be contradicted.
IV
At this point I expect to hear the reproach that
I have built up my construction which places
Moses the Egyptian in Ikhnaton's era, derives
from the political state the country was in at that
time his decision to protect the Jewish people,
and recognizes as the Aton religion the religion
he gave to his people or with which he burdened
them, which had just been abolished in Egypt
itself that I have built up this edifice of
his knife, his spit or his cooking vessel, or eat of the meat of an
(otherwise) clean ox that had been cut with a Greek knife. . . .
In haughty narrowness they looked down on the other peoples
who were unclean and not so near to the gods as they were."
(After Erman, The Egyptian Religion, p. 181, etc.)
Naturally we do not forget here the parallels from the life of
India. Whatever gave, by the way, the Jewish poet Heine in the
nineteenth century the idea of complaining about his religion as
" the plague trailing along from the valley of the Nile, the sickly
beliefs of the Ancient Egyptians " ?
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 51
conjectures with too great a certainty for which no
adequate grounds are to be found in the material
itself. I think this reproach would be unjustified.
I have already stressed the element of doubt in
the introduction, put a query in front of the
brackets, so to speak, and can therefore save
myself the trouble of repeating it at each point
inside the brackets.
Some of my own critical observations may
continue the discussion. The kernel of our thesis,
the dependence of Jewish monotheism on the
monotheistic episode in Egyptian history, has
been guessed and hinted at by several workers.
I need not cite them here, since none of them has
been able to say by what means this influence
was exerted. Even if, as I suggest, it is bound up
with the individuality of Moses, we shall have
to weigh other possibilities than the one here
preferred. It is not to be supposed that the over-
throw of the official Aton religion completely
put an end to the monotheistic trend in Egypt.
The School of Priests at On, from which it
emanated, survived the catastrophe and might
have drawn whole generations after Ikhnaton
into the orbit of their religious thought. That
Moses performed the deed is quite thinkable,
therefore, even if he did not live in Ikhnaton's
time and had not come under his personal
influence, even if he were simply an adherent or
merely a member of the school of On. This
52 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
conjecture would postpone the date of the
Exodus and bring it nearer to the time usually
assumed, the thirteenth century; otherwise it
has nothing to recommend it. We should have
to relinquish the insight we had gained into
Moses 5 motives and to dispense with the idea of
the Exodus being facilitated by the anarchy
prevailing in Egypt. The kings of the Nineteenth
Dynasty following Ikhnaton ruled the country
with a strong hand. All conditions, internal and
external, favouring the Exodus coincide only in
the period immediately after the death of the
heretic king.
The Jews possess a rich extra -biblical literature
where the myths and superstitions are to be found
which in the course of centuries were woven
around the gigantic figure of their first leader and
the founder of their religion and which have both
hallowed and obscured that figure. Some frag-
ments of sound tradition which had found no
place in the Pentateuch may lie scattered in that
material. One of these legends describes in an
attractive fashion how the ambition of the man
Moses had already displayed itself in his child-
hood. When Pharaoh took him into his arms and
playfully tossed him high, the little three-year-
old snatched the crown from Pharaoh's head and
placed it on his own. The king was startled at
this omen and took care to consult his sages. 1
1 The same anecdote, slightly altered, is to be found in Josephus.
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 53
Then, again, we are told of victorious battles he
fought as an Egyptian captain in Ethiopia and,
in the same connection, that he fled the country
because he had reason to fear the envy of a
faction at court or even the envy of Pharaoh
himself. The Biblical story itself lends Moses
certain features in which one is inclined to believe.
It describes him as choleric, hot-tempered as
when in his indignation he kills the brutal over-
seer who ill-treated a Jewish workman, or when
in his resentment at the defection of his people he
smashes the tables he has been given on Mount
Sinai. Indeed, God himself punished him at long
last for a deed of impatience we are not told
what it was. Since such a trait does not lend
itself to glorification it may very well be historical
truth. Nor can we reject even the possibility that
many character traits the Jews incorporated into
their early conception of God when they made
him jealous, stern and implacable, were taken
au fond from their memory of Moses, for in truth
it was not an invisible god, but the man Moses,
who had led them out of Egypt.
Another trait imputed to him deserves our
special interest. Moses was said to have been
" slow of speech " that is to say, he must have
had a speech impediment or inhibition so that
he had to call on Aaron (who is called his brother)
for assistance in his supposed discussions with
Pharaoh. This again may be historical truth and
54 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
would serve as a welcome addition to the
endeavour to make the picture of this great man
live. It may, however, have another and more
important significance. The report may, in a
slightly distorted way, recall the fact that Moses
spoke another language and was not able to
communicate with his Semitic Neo-Egyptians
without the help of an interpreter at least not
at the beginning of their intercourse. Thus a
fresh confirmation of the thesis: Moses was an
Egyptian.
It looks now as if the train of thought has come
to an end, at least for the time being. From the
surmise that Moses was an Egyptian, be it
proven or not, nothing more can be deduced for
the moment. No historian can regard the Biblical
account of Moses and the Exodus as other than a
pious myth, which transformed a remote tradi-
tion in the interest of its own tendencies. How
the tradition ran originally we do not know.
What the distorting tendencies were we should
like to guess, but we are kept in the dark by our
ignorance of the historical events. That our
reconstruction leaves no room for so many
spectacular features of the Biblical text the ten
plagues, the passage through the Red Sea, the
solemn law -giving on Mount Sinai will not
lead us astray. But we cannot remain indifferent
on finding ourselves in opposition to the sober
historical researches of our time.
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 55
These modern historians, well represented by
E. Meyer/ follow the Biblical text in one decisive
point. They concur that the Jewish tribes, who
later on become the people of Israel, at a certain
time accepted a new religion. But this event did
not take place in Egypt nor at the foot of a
mount in the Sinai peninsula, but in a place
called Meribat-Qades, an oasis distinguished by
its abundance of springs and wells in the country
south of Palestine between the eastern end of the
Sinai peninsula and the western end of Arabia.
There they took over the worship of a god Jahve,
probably from the Arabic tribe of Midianites who
lived near-by. Presumably other neighbouring
tribes were also followers of that god.
Jahve was certainly a volcano god. As we know,
however, Egypt has no volcanoes and the
mountains of the Sinai peninsula have never
been volcanic; on the other hand, volcanoes
which may have been active up to a late period
are found along the western border of Arabia.
One of these mountains must have been the
Sinai -Horeb which was believed to be Jahve J s
abode. 2 In spite of all the transformations the
Biblical text has suffered, we are able to re-
construct according to E. Meyer the orig-
inal character of the god: he is an uncanny,
1 E. Meyer: Die Israeliten und ihre Nachbarstdmme y 1906.
2 The Biblical text retains certain passages telling us that Jahve
descended from Sinai to Meribat-Qades.
56 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
bloodthirsty demon who walks by night and shuns
the light of day. 1
The mediator between the people and the god
at this birth of a new religion was called Moses.
He was the son-in-law of the Midianite priest
Jethro and was tending his flocks when he
received the divine summons. Jethro visited him
in Qades to give him instructions.
E. Meyer says, it is true, that he never doubted
there was a kernel of historical truth in the story
of the bondage in Egypt and the catastrophe of
the Egyptians, 2 but evidently he does not know
where that recognized fact belongs and what to
do with it. Only the custom of circumcision is he
willing to derive from the Egyptians. He enriches
our earlier discussion by two important sugges-
tions. First, that Joshua asked the people to
accept circumcision " to roll away the reproach
of Egypt " ; and, secondly, by the quotation from
Herodotus that the Phoenicians (which probably
means the Jews) and the Syrians in Palestine
themselves admitted having learned the custom
of circumcision from the Egyptians. 8 But an
Egyptian Moses does not appeal to him. " The
Moses we know was the ancestor of the priests of
Qades ; he stood therefore in relation to the cult,
was a figure of the genealogical myth and not an
historical person. So not one of those who has
treated him as an historical person except those
1 L.c., pp. 38, 58. 2 L.c., p. 49. 8 L.c., p. 449.
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 57
who accept tradition wholesale as historical truth
has succeeded in filling this empty shape with
any content, in describing him as a concrete
personality; they have had nothing to tell us
about what he achieved or about his mission in
history. 1
On the other hand, Meyer never wearies of
telling us about Moses' relation to Qades and
Midian. " The figure of Moses so closely bound
up with Midian and the holy places in the
desert. 55 * " This figure of Moses is inextricably
associated with Qades (Massa and Meriba) ; the
relationship with a Midianite priest by marriage
completes the picture. The connection with the
Exodus, on the other hand, and the story of his
youth in its entirety, are absolutely secondary
and are merely the consequence of Moses having
to fit into a connected, continuous story. 558 He
also observes that all the characteristics contained
in the story of Moses 5 youth were later omitted.
" Moses in Midian is no longer an Egyptian and
Pharaoh 5 s grandson, but a shepherd to whom
Jahve reveals himself. In the story of the ten
plagues his former relationships are no longer
mentioned, although they could have been used
very effectively, and the order to kill the Israelite
first-born is entirely forgotten. In the Exodus
and the perishing of the Egyptians Moses has no
part at all; he is not even mentioned. The
1 L.c., p. 451. 2 L.c. p. 49. 3 L.c. y p. 72.
58 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
characteristics of a hero, which the childhood
story presupposes, are entirely absent in the later
Moses ; he is only the man of God, a performer of
miracles, provided with supernatural powers by
Jahve." *
We cannot escape the impression that this
Moses of Qades and Midian, to whom tradition
could even ascribe the erection of a brazen serpent
as a healing god, is quite a different person from
the august Egyptian we had deduced, who dis-
closed to his people a religion in which all magic
and sorcery were most strictly abhorred. Our
Egyptian Moses differs perhaps no less from the
Midian Moses than the universal god Aton
differed from the demon Jahve on his divine
mountain. And if we concede any measure of
truth to the information furnished by modern
historians, then we have to admit that the thread
we wished to draw from the surmise that Moses
was an Egyptian has broken off for the second
time; this time, so it seems, without any hope
of its being tied again.
V
A way unexpectedly presents itself, however,
out of this difficulty too. The efforts to recognize
in Moses a figure transcending the priest of
! L.c., p. 47.
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 59
Qades, and confirming the renown with which
tradition had invested him, were continued after
E. Meyer by Gressmann and others. In 1922
E. Sellin made a discovery of decisive importance. 1
He found in the book of the prophet Hosea
second half of the eighth century unmistakable
traces of a tradition to the effect that the founder
of their religion (Moses) met a violent end in a
rebellion of his stubborn and refractory people.
The religion he had instituted was at the same
time abandoned. This tradition is not restricted
to Hosea : it recurs in the writings of most of the
later prophets; indeed, according to Sellin, it
was the basis of all the later expectations of the
Messiah. Towards the end of the Babylonian
exile the hope arose among the Jewish people
that the man they had so callously murdered
would return from the realm of the dead and lead
his contrite people and perhaps not only his
people into the land of eternal bliss. The
palpable connections with the destiny of the
Founder of a later religion do not lie in our present
course.
Naturally I am not in a position to decide
whether Sellin has correctly interpreted the
relevant passages in the prophets. If he is right,
however, we may regard as historically credible
the tradition he recognized: for such things are
1 E. Sellin, Most und seine Bedeutung fuer die israelitisch-juediscfu
Religionsgeschichte, 1922.
6O MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
not readily invented there is no tangible motive
for doing so. And if they have really happened
the wish to forget them is easily understood. We
need not accept every detail of the tradition.
Sellin thinks that Shittim in the land east of the
Jordan is indicated as the scene of the violent
deed. We shall see, however, that the choice of
this locality does not accord with our argument.
Let us adopt from Sellin the surmise that the
Egyptian Moses was killed by the Jews and the
religion he instituted abandoned. It allows us to
spin our thread further without contradicting the
trustworthy results of historical research. But we
venture to be independent of the historians in
other respects and to blaze our own trail. The
Exodus from Egypt remains our starting-point.
It must have been a considerable number that
left the country with Moses ; a small crowd would
not have been worth the while of that ambitious
man, with his great schemes. The immigrants
had probably been in the country long enough
to develop into a numerous people. We shall
certainly not go astray, however, if we suppose
with the majority of research workers that only a
part of those who later became the Jewish people
had undergone the fate of bondage in Egypt. In
other words, the tribe returning from Egypt
combined later in the country between Egypt and
Canaan with other related tribes that had been
settled there for some time. This union, from
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 6 1
which was born the people of Israel, expressed
itself in the adoption of a new religion, common
to all the tribes, the religion of Jahve; according
to E. Meyer, this came about in Qades under
the influence of the Midianites. Thereupon the
people felt strong enough to undertake the
invasion of Canaan. It does not fit in with this
course of events that the catastrophe to Moses and
his religion should have taken place in the land
east of the Jordan it must have happened a long
time before the union.
It is certain that many very diverse elements
contributed to the building up of the Jewish
people, but the greatest difference among them
must have depended on whether they had
experienced the sojourn in Egypt and what
followed it, or not. From this point of view we
may say that the nation was made up by the
union of two constituents, and it accords with this
fact that, after a short period of political unity,
it broke asunder into two parts the Kingdom of
Israel and the Kingdom of Judah. History loves
such restorations, in which later fusions are re-
dissolved and former separations become once
more apparent. The most impressive example
a very well-known one was provided by the
Reformation, when, after an interval of more
than a thousand years, it brought to light again
the frontier between the Germania that had been
Roman and the part that had always remained
62 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
independent. With the Jewish people we cannot
verify such a faithful reproduction of the former
state of affairs. Our knowledge of those times is
too uncertain to permit the assumption that the
northern Kingdom had absorbed the original
settlers, the southern those returning from Egypt;
but the later dissolution, in this case also, could
not have been unconnected with the earlier
union. The former Egyptians were probably
fewer than the others, but they proved to be on
a higher level culturally. They exercised a more
important influence on the later development of
the people because they brought with them a
tradition the others lacked.
Perhaps they brought something else, some-
thing more tangible than a tradition. Among the
greatest riddles of Jewish prehistoric times is that
concerning the antecedents of the Levites. They
are said to have been derived from one of the
twelve tribes of Israel, the tribe of Levi, but no
tradition has ever ventured to pronounce on
where that tribe originally dwelt or what portion
of the conquered country of Canaan had been
allotted to it. They occupied the most important
priestly positions, but yet they were distinguished
from the priests. A Levite is not necessarily a
priest; it is not the name of a caste. Our sup-
position about the person of Moses suggests an
explanation. It is not credible that a great
gentleman like the Egyptian Moses approached
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 63
a people strange to him without an escort. He
must have brought his retinue with him, his
nearest adherents, his scribes, his servants. These
were the original Levites. Tradition maintains
that Moses was a Levite. This seems a transparent
distortion of the actual state of affairs: the
Levites were Moses 5 people. This solution is
supported by what I mentioned in my previous
essay: that in later times we find Egyptian
names only among the Levites. 1 We may suppose
that a fair number of these Moses people escaped
the fate that overtook him and his religion.
They increased in the following generations and
fused with the people among whom they lived,
but they remained faithful to their master,
honoured his memory and retained the tradition
of his teaching. At the time of the union with
the followers of Jahve they formed an influential
minority, culturally superior to the rest.
I suggest and it is only a suggestion so far
that between the downfall of Moses and the
founding of a religion at Qades two generations
were born and vanished, that perhaps even a
century elapsed. I do not see my way to deter-
mine whether the Neo -Egyptians as I should
like to call those who returned from Egypt in
distinction to the other Jews met with their
1 This assumption fits in well with what Yahuda says about the
Egyptian influence on early Jewish writings. See A. S. Yahuda,
Die Sprache des Pentateuch in ihren Beziehungen zum Aegyptischen, 1929.
64 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
blood relations after these had already accepted
the Jahve religion or before that had happened.
Perhaps the latter is more likely. It makes no
difference to the final result. What happened at
Qades was a compromise, in which the part
taken by the Moses tribe is unmistakable.
Here we may call again on the custom of
circumcision which a kind of " Leitfossil "
has repeatedly rendered us important services.
This custom also became the law in the Jahve
religion, and since it is inextricably connected
with Egypt its adoption must signify a con-
cession to the people of Moses. They or the
Levites among them would not forgo this sign
of their consecration. They wanted to save so
much of their old religion, and for that price they
were willing to recognize the new deity and all
that the Midian priests had to say about him.
Possibly they managed to obtain still other con-
cessions. We have already mentioned that Jewish
ritual ordains a certain economy in the use of the
name of God. Instead of Jahve they had to say
Adonai. It is tempting to fit this commandment
into our argument, but that is merely a surmise.
The prohibition upon uttering the name of God
is, as is well known, a primaeval taboo. Why
exactly it was renewed in the Jewish command-
ments is not quite clear; it is not out of the
question that this happened under the influence
of a new motive. There is no reason to suppose
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 65
that the commandment was consistently followed;
the word Jahve was freely used in the formation
of personal theophorous names, i.e. in combina-
tions such as Jochanan, Jehu, Joshua. Yet there
is something peculiar about this name. It is
well known that Biblical exegesis recognizes two
sources of the Hexateuch. They are called J and
E because the one uses the holy name of Jahve,
the other that of Elohim ; Elohim, it is true, not
Adonai. But we may here quote the remark of
one writer: the different names are a distinct
sign of originally different gods. 1
We admitted the adherence to the custom of
circumcision as evidence that at the founding of
the new religion at Qades a compromise had
taken place. What it consisted in we learn from
both J and E; the two accounts coincide and
must therefore go back to a common source,
either a written source or an oral tradition. The
guiding purpose was to prove the greatness and
power of the new god Jahve. Since the Moses
people attached such great importance to their
experience of the Exodus from Egypt, the deed of
freeing them had to be ascribed to Jahve; it had
to be adorned with features that proved the
terrific grandeur of this volcano god, such as, for
example, the pillar of smoke which changed to
one of fire by night, or the storm that parted the
waters so that the pursuers were drowned by the
1 Gressmann Mose und Seine ^eit^ 1913.
E
66 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
returning floods of water. The Exodus and the
founding of the new religion were thus brought
close together in time, the long interval between
them being denied. The bestowal of the Ten
Commandments too was said to have taken place,
not at Qades, but at the foot of the Holy Moun-
tain amidst the signs of a volcanic eruption. This
description, however, did a serious wrong to the
memory of the man Moses; it was he, and not
the volcano god, who had freed his people from
Egypt. Some compensation was therefore due to
him, and it was given by transposing Moses to
Qades or to the mount Sinai -Horeb and putting
him in the place of the Midianite priest. We shall
consider later how this solution satisfied another,
irresistibly urgent, tendency. By its means a
balance, so to speak, was established : Jahve was
allowed to extend his reach to Egypt from his
mountain in Midia, while the existence and
activity of Moses were transferred to Qades and
the country east of the Jordan. This is how he
became one with the person who later established
a religion, the son-in-law of the Midianite
Jethro, the man to whom he lent his name Moses.
We know nothing personal, however, about this
other Moses he is entirely obscured by the first,
the Egyptian Moses except possibly from clues
provided by the contradictions to be found in the
Bible in the characterization of Moses. He is
often enough described as masterful, hot-tempered,
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 67
even violent, and yet it is also said of him
that he was the most patient and sweet-tempered
of all men. It is clear that the latter qualities
would have been of no use to the Egyptian Moses
who planned such great and difficult projects for
his people. Perhaps they belonged to the other,
the Midianite. I think we are justified in separat-
ing the two persons from each other and in
assuming that the Egyptian Moses never was in
Qades and had never heard the name of Jahve,
whereas the Midianite Moses never set foot in
Egypt and knew nothing of Aton. In order to
make the two people into one, tradition or legend
had to bring the Egyptian Moses to Midian ; and
we have seen that more than one explanation
was given for it.
VI
I am quite prepared to hear anew the reproach
that I have put forward my reconstruction of the
early history of the tribe of Israel with undue and
unjustified certitude. I shall not feel this criticism
to be too harsh, since it finds an echo in my own
judgement. I know myself that this reconstruc-
tion has its weak places, but it also has its strong
ones. On the whole the arguments in favour
of continuing this work in the same direction
prevail. The Biblical record before us contains
68 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
valuable, nay invaluable, historical evidence. It
has, however, been distorted by tendentious
influences and elaborated by the products of
poetical invention. In our work we have already
been able to divine one of these distorting ten-
dencies. This discovery shall guide us on our
way. It is a hint to uncover other similar distorting
influences. If we find reasons for recognizing the
distortions produced by them, then we shall be able
to bring to light more of the true course of events.
Let us begin by marking what critical research
work on the Bible has to say about how the
Hexateuch the five Books of Moses and the
Book of Joshua, for they alone are of interest to
us here came to be written. 1 The oldest source
is considered to be J, the Jahvistic, in the author
of which the most modern research workers think
they can recognize the priest Ebjatar, a con-
temporary of King David. 2 A little later, it is
not known how much later, comes the so-called
Elohistic, belonging to the northern kingdom. 8
After the destruction of this kingdom, in 722 B.C.,
a Jewish priest combined portions of J and E and
added his own contributions. His compilation
is designated as JE. In the seventh century
Deuteronomy, the fifth book, was added, it being
alleged that the whole of it had been newly found
1 Encyclopedia Britannica, XI Edition, 1910, Art.: Bible.
2 See Auerbach, Wuste und Gelobtes Land, 1932.
3 Astruc in 1 753 was the first to distinguish between Jahvist and
Elohist.
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 69
in the Temple. In the time after the destruction
of the Temple, in 586 B.C., during the Exile and
after the return, is placed the re-writing called
the Priestly Code. The fifth century saw a
definitive revision, and since then the work has
not been materially altered. 1
The history of King David and his time is most
probably the work of one of his contemporaries.
It is real history, five hundred years before
Herodotus, the " Father of History." One would
begin to understand this achievement if one
assumed, in terms of my hypothesis, Egyptian
influence. 2 The suggestion has even been made
that early Israelites, the scribes of Moses, had a
hand in the invention of the first alphabet. 3 How
far the accounts of former times are based on
earlier sources or on oral tradition, and what
1 It is historically certain that the Jewish type was definitely
fixed as a result of the reforms by Ezra and Nehemiah in the fifth
century B.C., therefore after the Exile, during the reign of the
friendly Persians. According to our reckoning approximately 900
years had then passed since the appearance of Moses. By these
reforms the regulations aiming at the consecration of the chosen
people were taken seriously: the separation from the other tribes
were put into force by forbidding mixed marriages; the Penta-
teuch, the real compilation of the law, was codified in its definitive
form; the re -writing known as the Priestly Code was finished. It
seems certain, however, that the reform did not adopt any new
tendencies, but simply took over and consolidated former sugges-
tions.
2 Gf. Yahuda, l.c.
3 If they were bound by the prohibition against making images
they had even a motive for forsaking the hieroglyphic picture
writing when they adapted their written signs for the expression
of a new language.
7<3 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
interval elapsed between an event and its fixation
by writing, we are naturally unable to know.
The text, however, as we find it to-day tells us
enough about its own history. Two distinct forces,
diametrically opposed to each other, have left
their traces on it. On the one hand, certain
transformations got to work on it, falsifying the
text in accord with secret tendencies, maiming
and extending it until it was turned into its
opposite. On the other hand, an indulgent piety
reigned over it, anxious to keep everything as it
stood, indifferent to whether the details fitted
together or nullified one another. Thus almost
everywhere there can be found striking omissions,
disturbing repetitions, palpable contradictions,
signs of things the communication of which was
never intended. The distortion of a text is not
unlike a murder. The difficulty lies not in the
execution of the deed but in the doing away with
the traces. One could wish to give the word
" distortion " the double meaning to which it
has a right, although it is no longer used in this
sense. It should mean not only " to change the
appearance of," but also " to wrench apart, 35
" to put in another place. 55 That is why in so
many textual distortions we may count on finding
the suppressed and abnegated material hidden
away somewhere, though in an altered shape and
torn out of its original connection. Only it is
not always easy to recognize it.
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN
The distorting tendencies we want to detect
must have influenced the traditions before they
were written down. One of them, perhaps the
strongest of all, we have already discovered. We
said that when the new god Jahve in Qades was
instituted something had to be done to glorify
him. It is truer to say: He had to be established,
made room for; traces of former religions had to
be extinguished. This seems to have been done
successfully with the religion of the settled tribes ;
no more was heard of it. With the returning
tribes the task was not so easy; they were deter-
mined not to be deprived of the Exodus from
Egypt, the man Moses and the custom of circum-
cision. It is true they had been in Egypt, but they
had left it again, and from now on every trace of
Egyptian influence was to be denied. Moses was
disposed of by displacing him to Midian and
Qades and making him into one person with the
priest who founded the Jahve religion. Circum-
cision, the most compromising sign of the
dependence on Egypt, had to be retained, but, in
spite of all the existing evidence, every endeavour
was made to divorce this custom from Egypt.
The enigmatic passage in Exodus, written in an
almost incomprehensible style, saying that God
had been wroth with Moses for neglecting cir-
cumcision and that his Midianite wife saved his
life by a speedy operation, can be interpreted
only as a deliberate contradiction of the significant
72 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
truth. We shall soon come across another inven-
tion for the purpose of invalidating a piece of
inconvenient evidence.
It is hardly to be described as a new tendency
it is only the continuation of the same one
when we find an endeavour completely to deny
that Jahve was a new god, one alien to the Jews.
For that purpose the myths of the patriarchs,
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, are drawn upon.
Jahve maintains that He had been the God of
those patriarchs; it is true and He has to admit
this Himself they did not worship Him under
this name. 1
He does not add under what other name He used
to be worshipped. Here the opportunity was taken
to deal a decisive blow at the Egyptian origin of
the custom of circumcision. Jahve was said to have
already demanded it from Abraham, to have
instituted it as sign of the bond between him and
Abraham's descendants. This, however, was a
particularly clumsy invention. If one wished
to use a sign to distinguish someone from other
people, one would choose something that the
others did not possess certainly not something
that millions could show. An Israelite, finding
himself in Egypt, would have had to recognize
all Egyptians as brothers, bound by the same bond,
brothers in Jahve. The fact that circumcision
1 The restrictions in the use of the new name do not become any
more comprehensible through this, though much more suspect.
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 73
was native to the Egyptians could not pos-
sibly have been unknown to the Israelites who
created the text of the Bible. The passage from
Joshua quoted by E. Meyer freely admits this; but
nevertheless the fact had at all costs to be denied.
We cannot expect religious myths to pay
scrupulous attention to logical connections.
Otherwise the feeling of the people might have
taken exception -justifiably so to the behaviour
of a deity who makes a covenant with his patri-
archs containing mutual obligations, and then
ignores his human partners for centuries until it
suddenly occurs to him to reveal himself again
to their descendants. Still more astonishing is
the conception of a god suddenly " choosing " a
people, making it " his " people and himself its
own god. I believe it is the only case in the
history of human religions. In other cases the
people and their god belong inseparably together;
they are one from the beginning. Sometimes, it
is true, we hear of a people adopting another god,
but never of a god choosing a new people.
Perhaps we approach an understanding of this
unique happening when we reflect on the con-
nection between Moses and the Jewish people.
Moses had stooped to the Jews, had made them
his people; they were his " chosen people/ 5 1
1 Jahve was undoubtedly a volcano god. There was no reason
for the inhabitants of Egypt to worship him. I am certainly not
the first to be struck by the similarity of the name Jahve to the
root of the name of another god : Jupiter, Jovis. The composite
74 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
There was yet another purpose in bringing the
patriarchs into the new Jahve religion. They had
lived in Canaan; their memory was connected
with certain localities in the country. Possibly
they themselves had been Canaanite heroes or
local divinities whom the immigrating Israelites
had adopted for their early history. By evoking
them one gave proof, so to speak, of having been
born and bred in the country, and denied the
odium that clings to the alien conqueror. It was
name Jochanaan, made up in part from the Hebrew word Jahve
and having a rather similar meaning to that of Godfrey or its
Punic equivalent Hannibal, has become one of the most popular
names of European Christendom in the forms of Johann, John,
Jean, Juan. When the Italians reproduce it in the shape of
Giovanni and then call one day of the week Giovedi they bring to
light again a similarity which perhaps means nothing or possibly
means very much. Far-reaching possibilities, though very in-
secure ones, open out here. In those dark centuries which
historical research is only beginning to explore, the countries
around the eastern basin of the Mediterranean were apparently
the scene of frequent and violent volcanic eruptions which were
bound to make the deepest impression on the inhabitants. Evans
supposes that the final destruction of the palace of Minos at
Knossos was also the result of an earthquake. In Crete, as
probably everywhere in the ^Sgean world, the great Mother
Goddess was then worshipped. The observation that she was
unable to guard her house against the attack of a stronger power
might have contributed to her having to cede her place to a male
deity, whereupon the volcano god had the first right to replace
her. Zeus still bears the name of " the Earth -shaker." There is
hardly a doubt that in those obscure times mother deities were
replaced by male gods (perhaps originally their sons). Specially
impressive is the fate of Pallas Athene, who was no doubt the
local form of the mother deity ; through the religious revolution
she was reduced to a daughter, robbed of her own mother, and
eternally debarred from motherhood by the taboo of virginity.
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 75
a clever turn: the god Jahve gave them only
what their ancestors had once possessed.
In the later contributions to the Biblical text
the tendency to avoid mentioning Qades met
with success. The site of the founding of the new
religion definitely became the divine mountains
Sinai-Horeb. The motive is not clearly visible;
perhaps they did not want to be reminded of the
influence of Midian. But all later distortions,
especially those of the Priestly Code, serve another
aim. There was no longer any need to alter in a
particular direction descriptions of happenings of
long ago; that had long been done. On the
other hand, an endeavour was made to date
back to an early time certain laws and institu-
tions of the present, to base them as a rule on the
Mosaic law and to derive from this their claim to
holiness and binding force. However much the
picture of past times in this way became falsified,
the procedure does not lack a certain psycho-
logical justification. It reflected the fact that in
the course of many centuries about 800 years
had elapsed between the Exodus and the fixation
of the Biblical text by Ezra and Nehemiah the
religion of Jahve had followed a retrograde
development that had culminated in a fusion
(perhaps to the point of actual identity) with the
original religion of Moses.
And this is the essential outcome: the fateful
content of the religious history of the Jews.
j6 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
VII
Among all the events of Jewish prehistory that
poets, priests and historians of a later age under-
took to portray there was an outstanding one the
suppression of which was called for by the most
obvious and best of human motives. It was the
murder of the great leader and liberator Moses,
which Sellin divined from clues furnished by the
Prophets. Sellings presumption cannot be called
fanciful; it is probable enough. Moses, trained
in Ikhnaton's school, employed the same methods
as the king; he gave commands and forced his
religion on the people. 1 Perhaps Moses 5 doctrine
was still more uncompromising than that of his
Master; he had no need to retain any connection
with the religion of the Sun God since the school
of On would have no importance for his alien
people. Moses met with the same fate as Ikhnaton,
that fate which awaits all enlightened despots.
The Jewish people of Moses was quite as unable
to bear such a highly spiritualized religion, to
find in what it offered satisfaction for their needs,
as were the Egyptians of the Eighteenth Dynasty.
In both cases the same thing happened: those
who felt themselves kept in tutelage, or who felt
dispossessed, revolted and threw off the burden
1 In those times any other form of influence would scarcely have
been possible.
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 77
of a religion that had been forced on them. But
while the tame Egyptians waited until fate had
removed the sacred person of their Pharaoh, the
savage Semites took their destiny into their own
hands and did away with their tyrant. 1
Nor can we maintain that the Biblical text
preserved to us does not prepare us for such an
end to Moses. The account of the " Wandering
in the Wilderness " which might stand for the
time of Moses' rule describes a series of grave
revolts against his authority which, by Jahve's
command, were suppressed with savage chastise-
ment. It is easy to imagine that one of those
revolts came to another end than the text admits.
The people's falling away from the new religion
is also mentioned in the text, though as a mere
episode. It is the story of the golden calf, where
by an adroit turn the breaking of the tables of the
law which has to be understood symbolically
(= "he has broken the law ") is ascribed
to Moses himself and imputed to his angry
indignation.
There came a time when the people regretted
the murder of Moses and tried to forget it. This
was certainly so at the time of the coming
1 It is truly remarkable how seldom we hear during the millenia
of Egyptian history of violent depositions or assassinations of a
Pharaoh. A comparison with Assyrian history, for example, must
increase this astonishment. The reason may, of course, be that
with the Egyptians historical recording served exclusively official
purposes.
78 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
together at Qades. If, however, the Exodus were
brought nearer in time to the founding of their
religion in the oasis, and one allowed Moses
instead of the other founder to help in it, then
not only were the claims of the Moses people
satisfied, but the painful fact of his violent
removal was also successfully denied. In reality
it is most unlikely that Moses could have par-
ticipated in the events at Qades, even if his life
had not been shortened.
Here we must try to elucidate the sequence of
these events. We have placed the Exodus from
Egypt in the time after the extinction of the
Eighteenth Dynasty (1350). It might have
happened then or a little later, for the Egyptian
chroniclers included the subsequent years of
anarchy in the reign of Haremhab, the king who
brought it to an end and who reigned until 1315.
The next aid in fixing the chronology and it is
the only one is given by the stele of Merneptah
(1225-1215), which extols the victory over
Isiraal (Israel) and the destruction of their seeds
(sic). Unfortunately the value of this stele is
doubtful ; it is taken to be evidence that Israelite
tribes were at that date already settled in
Canaan. 1 E. Meyer rightly concludes from this
stele that Merneptah could not have been the
Pharaoh of the Exodus, as one had previously
been wont to assume. The Exodus must belong
1 E. Meyer, I.e., p. 222.
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 79
to an earlier period. The question who was
Pharaoh at the time of the Exodus appears to
me an idle one. There was no Pharaoh at that
time, because the Exodus happened during the
interregnum. But the Merneptah stele does not
throw any light on the possible date of the fusion
and the acceptance of the new religion in Qades.
All we can say with certainty is that they took
place some time between 1350 and 1215. Within
this century we assume the Exodus to have been
very near to the first date, the events in Qades
not far from the second. The greater part of the
period we would reserve for the interval between
the two events. A fairly long time would be
necessary for the passions of the returning tribes
to cool down after the murder of Moses and for
the influence of the Moses people, the Levites, to
have become so strong as the compromise in
Qades presupposes. Two generations, sixty years,
might suffice, but only just. The date inferred
from the stele of Merneptah falls too early, and
as we know that in our hypothesis one assumption
only rests on another we have to admit that this
discussion shows a weak spot in the construction.
Unfortunately everything connected with the
settling of the Jewish people in Canaan is highly
obscure and confused. We might, of course, use
the expedient of supposing that the name in the
Israel stele does not refer to the tribes whose fate
we are trying to follow and who later on were
8O MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
united in the people of Israel. After all, the name
of the Habiru (= Hebrews) from the Amarna
time was also passed on to this people.
Whenever it was that the different tribes were
united into a nation by accepting the same
religion it might very well have been an occur-
rence of no great importance for the history of
the world. The new religion might have been
swept away by the stream of events, Jahve would
then have taken his place in the procession of
erstwhile gods which Flaubert visualized, and of
his people all the twelve tribes would have been
" lost," not only the ten for whom the Anglo-
Saxons have so long been searching. The god
Jahve, to whom the Midianite Moses led a new
people, was probably in no way a remarkable
being. A rude, narrow-minded local god, violent
and blood-thirsty, he had promised his adherents
to give them " a land flowing with milk and
honey " and he encouraged them to rid the
country of its present inhabitants " with the edge
of the sword. " It is truly astonishing that in
spite of all the revisions in the Biblical text so
much was allowed to stand whereby we may
recognize his original nature. It is not even sure
that his religion was a true monotheism, that it
denied the character of god to other divinities.
It probably sufficed that one's own god was more
powerful than all strange gods. When the
sequence of events took quite another course than
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 8 1
such beginnings would lead us to expect there
can be only one reason for it. To one part of the
people the Egyptian Moses had given another
and more spiritual conception of God, a single
God who embraces the whole world, one as all-
loving as he was all-powerful, who averse to all
ceremonial and magic set humanity as its
highest aim a life of truth and justice. For,
incomplete as our information about the ethical
side of the Aton religion may be, it is surely
significant that Ikhnaton regularly described
himself in his inscriptions as " living in Maat "
(truth, justice). 1 In the long run it did not matter
that the people, probably after a very short time,
renounced the teaching of Moses and removed
the man himself. The tradition itself remained
and its influence reached though only slowly,
in the course of centuries the aim that was
denied to Moses himself. The god Jahve attained
undeserved honour when, from Qades onward,
Moses 5 deed of liberation was put down to his
account; but he had to pay dear for this usurpa-
tion. The shadow of the god whose place he had
taken became stronger than himself; at the end
of the historical development there arose beyond
his Being that of the forgotten Mosaic God.
None can doubt that it was only the idea of this
1 His hymns lay stress on not only the universality and oneness of
God, but also His loving kindness for all creatures; they invite
believers to enjoy nature and its beauties. Gp. Breasted, The
Dawn of Conscience.
F
82 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
other God that enabled the people of Israel to
surmount all their hardships and to survive until
our time.
It is no longer possible to determine the part
the Levites played in the final victory of the
Mosaic God over Jahve. When the compromise
at Qades was effected they had raised their voice
for Moses, their memory being still green of the
master whose followers and countrymen they
were. During the centuries since then the Levites
had become one with the people or with the
priesthood and it had become the main task of
the priests to develop and supervise the ritual,
besides caring for the holy texts and revising them
in accordance with their purposes. But was not
all this sacrifice and ceremonial at bottom only
magic and black art, such as the old doctrine of
Moses had unconditionally condemned ? There
arose from the midst of the people an unending
succession of men, not necessarily descended from
Moses 5 people, but seized by the great and power-
ful tradition which had gradually grown in dark-
ness, and it was these men, the prophets, who
sedulously preached the old Mosaic doctrine:
the Deity spurns sacrifice and ceremonial; He
demands only belief and a life of truth and
justice (Maat) . The efforts of the prophets met
with enduring success; the doctrines with which
they re-established the old belief became the
permanent content of the Jewish religion. It is
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 83
honour enough for the Jewish people that it has
kept alive such a tradition and produced men who
lent it their voice even if the stimulus had first
come from outside, from a great stranger.
This description of events would leave me with
a feeling of uncertainty were it not that I can refer
to the judgement of other, expert, research workers
who see the importance of Moses for the history of
Jewish religion in the same light, although they
do not recognize his Egyptian origin. Sellin says,
for example: I " Therefore we have to picture
the true religion of Moses, the belief he proclaimed
in one, ethical god, as being from now on, as a
matter of course, the possession of a small circle
within the people. We cannot expect to find it
from the start in the official cult, the priests 3
religion, in the general belief of the people. All
we can expect is that here and there a spark flies
up from the spiritual fire he had kindled, that
his ideas have not died out, but have quietly
influenced beliefs and customs until, sooner or
later, under the influence of special events, or
through some personality particularly immersed
in this belief, they broke forth again more strongly
and gained dominance with the broad mass of
the people. It is from this point of view that we
have to regard the early religious history of
the old Israelites. Were we to reconstruct the
Mosaic religion after the pattern laid down in the
1 Sellin, I.e., p. 52.
84 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
historical documents that describe the religion of
the first five centuries in Canaan we should fall
into the worst methodical error. 55 Volz 1 expresses
himself still more explicitly. He says : " that
the heaven -soaring work of Moses was at first
hardly understood and feebly carried out, until
during the course of centuries it penetrated more
and more into the spirit of the people and at last
found kindred souls in the great prophets who
continued the work of the lonely Founder."
With this I have come to an end, my sole
purpose having been to fit the figure of an
Egyptian Moses into the framework of Jewish
history. I may now express my conclusion in the
shortest formula: To the well-known duality of
that history two peoples who fuse together to
form one nation, two kingdoms into which this
nation divides, two names for the Deity in the
source of the Bible we add two new ones : the
founding of two new religions, the first one ousted
by the second and yet reappearing victorious,
two founders of religions, who are both called by
the same name Moses and whose personalities
we have to separate from each other. And all
these dualities are necessary consequences of the
first: one section of the people passed through
what may properly be termed a traumatic
experience which the other was spared. There
still remains much to discuss, to explain and to
1 Paul Volz: Mose, 1907, p. 64.
IF MOSES WAS AN EGYPTIAN 85
assert. Only then would the interest in our
purely historical study be fully warranted. In
what exactly consists the intrinsic nature of a
tradition, and in what resides its peculiar power,
how impossible it is to deny the personal influence
of individual great men on the history of the
world, what profanation of the grandiose multi-
formity of human life we commit if we recognize
as sole motives those springing from material
needs, from what sources certain ideas, especially
religious ones, derive the power with which they
subjugate individuals and peoples to study all
this on the particular case of Jewish history would
be an alluring task. Such a continuation of my
essay would link up with conclusions laid down
twenty-five years ago in Totem and Taboo. But
I hardly trust my powers any further.
PART III
MOSES, HIS PEOPLE AND
MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION
Part III
MOSES, HIS PEOPLE AND
MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION
PREFATORY NOTES
i. Written before March 1938 (Vienna)
WITH the audacity of one who has little or nothing
to lose I propose to break a well-founded resolu-
tion for the second time and to follow up my two
essays on Moses (Imago, Bd. XXIII, Heft i and 3)
with the final part, till now withheld. When I
finished the last essay I said I knew full well that
my powers would not suffice for the task. I was,
of course, referring to the weakening of the crea-
tive faculties which accompanies old age, 1 but
there was also another obstacle. We live in very
remarkable times. We find with astonishment
that progress has concluded an alliance with bar-
barism. In Soviet Russia the attempt has been
1 I do not share the opinion of my gifted contemporary Bernard
Shaw that men would achieve anything worth while only if they
could attain the age of 300 years. With the mere lengthening of
the period of life nothing would be gained unless much in the
conditions of life were radically changed as well.
89
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 9 1
shall guard against doing anything that would
serve his interests is more dangerous than the old
one, with whom we have learned to live in peace.
Psycho -analytic research is in any case the subject
of suspicious attention from Catholicism. I do
not maintain that this suspicion is unmerited. If
our research leads us to a result that reduces
religion to the status of a neurosis of mankind and
explains its grandiose powers in the ^ame way as
we should a neurotic obsession in our individual
patients, then we may be sure we shall incur in
this country the greatest resentment of the powers
that be. It is not that I have anything new to say,
nothing that I have not clearly expressed a quarter
of a century ago. All that, however, has been for-
gotten, and it would undoubtedly have some
effect were I to repeat it now and to illustrate it
by an example typical of the way in which re-
ligions are founded. It would probably lead to our
being forbidden to work in Psycho -Analysis. Such
violent methods of suppression are by no means
alien to the Catholic Church ; she feels it rather as
an intrusion into her privileges when other people
resort to the same means. Psycho -Analysis, how-
ever, which has travelled everywhere during the
course of my long life, has not yet found a more
serviceable home than in the city where it was
born and grew.
I do not only think so, I know that this external
danger will deter me from publishing the last
92 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
part of my treatise on Moses. I have tried to
remove this obstacle by telling myself that my
fear is based on an over-estimation of my
personal importance, and that the authorities
would probably be quite indifferent to what I
should have to say about Moses and the origin
of monotheistic religions. Yet I do not feel sure
that my judgement is correct. It seems to me
more likely that malice and an appetite for
sensation would make up for the importance I
may lack in the eyes of the world. So I shall not
publish this essay. But that need not hinder me
from writing it. The more so since it was written
once before, two years ago, and thus only needs
re -writing and adding on to the two previous
essays. Thus it may lie hid until the time comes
when it may safely venture into the light of day,
or until someone else who reaches the same
opinions and conclusions can be told: " In
darker days there lived a man who thought as
you did."
II. June 1938 (London)
The exceptionally great difficulties which have
weighed on me during the composition of this
essay dealing with Moses inner misgivings as
well as external hindrances are the reason why
this third and final part comes to have two differ-
ent prefaces which contradict, indeed even cancel,
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 93
each other. For in the short interval between
writing the two prefaces the outer conditions of
the author have radically changed. Formerly
I lived under the protection of the Catholic
Church and feared that by publishing the essay
I should lose that protection and that the practi-
tioners and students of psycho-analysis in Austria
would be forbidden their work. Then, suddenly,
the German invasion broke in on us and Catholic-
ism proved to be, as the Bible has it, " but a
broken reed. 35 In the certainty of persecution
now not only because of my work, but also
because of my " race " I left with many friends
the city which from early childhood, through
78 years, had been a home to me.
I found the kindliest welcome in beautiful, free,
generous England. Here I live now, a welcome
guest, relieved from that oppression and happy
that I may again speak and write I almost said
" think " as I want or have to. I dare now to
make public the last part of my essay.
There are no more external hindrances or at
least none that need alarm one. In the few weeks
of my stay I have received a large number of
greetings, from friends who told me how glad
they were to see me here, and from people un-
known to me, barely interested in my work, who
simply expressed their satisfaction that I had
found freedom and security here. Besides all this
there came, with a frequency bewildering to a
94 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
foreigner, letters of another kind, expressing
concern for the weal of my soul, and anxious to
point me the way to Christ and to enlighten me
about the future of Israel. The good people who
wrote thus could not have known much about me.
I expect, however, that when this new work of
mine becomes known among my new compatriots
I shall lose with my correspondents and a number
of the others something of the sympathy they now
extend to me.
The inner difficulties were not to be changed
by the different political system and the new
domicile. Now as then I am uneasy when con-
fronted with my own work; I miss the conscious-
ness of unity and intimacy that should exist
between the author and his work. This does not
mean that I lack conviction in the correctness of
my conclusions. That conviction I acquired a
quarter of a century ago, when I wrote my book
on Totem and Taboo (in 1912), and it has only
become stronger since. From then on I have
never doubted "that religious phenomena are to
be understood only on the model of the neurotic
symptoms of the individual, which are so familiar
to us, as a return of long forgotten important
happenings in the primaeval history of the human
family, that they owe their obsessive character to
that very origin and therefore derive their effect
on mankind from the historical truth they contain.
My uncertainty begins only at the point when I
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 95
ask myself the question whether I have succeeded
in proving this for the example of Jewish Mono-
theism chosen here. To my critical faculties this
treatise, proceeding from a study of the man
Moses, seems like a dancer balancing on one toe.
If I had not been able to find support in the
analytic interpretation of the exposure myth and
pass thence to Sellings suggestion concerning
Moses 5 end, the whole treatise would have to
remain unwritten. However, let me proceed.
I begin by abstracting the results of my second
the purely historical essay on Moses. I shall
not examine them critically here, since they form
the premisses of the psychological discussions
which are based on them and which continually
revert to them.
SECTION I
i . The Historical Premisses
The historical background of the events which
have aroused our interest is as follows. Through
the conquests of the Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt
had become a world Empire. The new Im-
perialism was reflected in the development of
certain religious ideas, if not in those of the whole
people, yet in those of the governing and in-
tellectually active upper stratum. Under the
MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
influence of the priests of the Sun God at On
(Heliopolis), possibly strengthened by suggestions
from Asia, there arose the idea of a universal God
Aton no longer restricted to one people and one
country. With the young Amenhotep IV (who
later changed his name to Ikhnaton) a Pharaoh
succeeded to the throne who knew no higher in-
terest than in developing the idea of such a God.
He raised the Aton religion to the official religion
and thereby the universal God became the Only
God ; all that was said of the other gods became
deceit and guile. With a superb implacability he
resisted all the temptations of magical thought
and discarded the illusion, dear particularly to
the Egyptians, of a life after death. With an aston-
ishing premonition of later scientific knowledge
he recognised in the energy of the sun's radiation
the source of all life on earth and worshipped the
sun as the symbol of his God's power. He gloried
in his joy in the Creation and in his life in Maat
(truth and justice) .
It is the first case in the history of mankind,
and perhaps the purest, of a monotheistic religion.
A deeper knowledge of the historical and psycho-
logical conditions of its origin would be of
inestimable value. Care was taken, however,
that not much information concerning the Aton
religion should come down to us. Already under
the reign of Ikhnaton's weak successors everything
he had created broke down. The priesthood
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 97
he had suppressed vented their fury on his
memory. The Aton religion was abolished; the
capital of the heretic Pharaoh demolished and
pillaged. In 13506.0. the Eighteenth Dynasty
was extinguished; after an interval of anarchy
the general Haremhab, who reigned until 1315,
restored order. Ikhnaton's reforms seemed to be
but an episode, doomed to be forgotten.
This is what has been established historically
and at this point our work of hypothesis begins.
Among the intimates of Ikhnaton was a man who
was perhaps called Thothrnes, as so many others
were at that time; l the name does not matter,
but its second part must have been -mose. He
held high rank, and was a convinced adherent of
the Aton religion, but in contradistinction to the
brooding King he was forceful and passionate.
For this man the death of Ikhnaton and the
abolishing of his religion meant the end of all his
hopes. Only proscribed or recanting could he
remain in Egypt. If he were governor of a border
province he might well have come into touch with
a certain Semitic tribe which had immigrated
several generations ago. In his disappointment
and loneliness he turned to those strangers and
sought in them for a compensation of what he
had lost. He chose them for his people and tried
to realize his own ideals through them. After he
1 This, for example, was also the name of the sculptor whose
workroom was discovered in Tell-el-Amarna.
G
98 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
had left Egypt with them accompanied by his
immediate followers he hallowed them by the
custom of circumcision, gave them laws and
introduced them to the Aton religion which the
Egyptians had just discarded. Perhaps the rules
the man Moses imposed on his Jews were even
harder than those of his master and teacher
Ikhnaton; perhaps he also relinquished the
connection with the Sun God of On, to whom the
latter had still adhered.
For the Exodus from Egypt we must fix the
time of the interregnum after 1350. The sub-
sequent periods of time, until possession was
taken of the land of Canaan, are especially
obscure. Out of the darkness which the Biblical
Text has here left or rather created the his-
torical research of our days can distinguish two
facts. The first, discovered by E. Sellin, is that
the Jews, who even according to the Bible were
stubborn and unruly towards their law-giver
and leader, rebelled at last, killed him and threw
off the imposed Aton religion as the Egyptians
had done before them. The second fact, proved
by E. Meyer, is that these Jews on their return
from Egypt united with tribes nearly related to
them, in the country bordering on Palestine, the
Sinai peninsula and Arabia, and that there, in
a fertile spot called Qades, they accepted under
the influence of the Arabian Midianites a new
religion, the worship of the volcano God Jahve.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 99
Soon after this they were ready to conquer
Canaan.
The relationship in time of these two events to
each other and to the Exodus is very uncertain.
The next historical allusion is given in a stele of
the Pharaoh Merneptah, who reigned until 1215,
which numbers " Israel " among the vanquished
in his conquests in Syria and Palestine. If we
take the date of this stele as a terminus ad quern
there remains for the whole course of events,
starting from the Exodus, about a century
after 1350 until before 1215. It is possible,
however, that the name Israel does not yet refer
to the tribes whose fate we are here following and
that in reality we have a longer period at our
disposal. The settling of the later Jewish people
in Canaan was certainly not a swiftly achieved
conquest; it was rather a series of successive
struggles and must have stretched over a longish
period. If we discard the restriction imposed by
the Merneptah stele we may more readily assume
thirty years, a generation, as the time of Moses l
and two generations at least, probably more,
until the union in Qades took place; 2 the interval
between Qades and the setting out for Canaan
need not have been long. Jewish tradition had
1 This would accord with the forty years' wandering in the
desert of which the Bible tells us.
2 Thus about 1350-40 to 1320-10 for Moses, 1260 or perhaps
rather later for Qades, the Merneptah stele before 1215.
IOO MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
as I have shown in my last essay good reason to
shorten the interval between the Exodus and the
foundation of a religion in Qades ; our argument
would incline us to favour the contrary.
Till now we have been concerned with the ex-
ternal aspects of the story, with an attempt to fill
in the gaps of our historical knowledge in part
a repetition of my second essay. Our interest
follows the fate of Moses and his doctrines, to
which the revolt of the Jews only apparently put
an end. From the Jahvist account written down
about IOOOB.C., though doubtless founded on
earlier material we have learned that the union
of the tribes and foundation of a religion in
Qades represented a compromise, the two parts
of which are still easily distinguishable. One
partner was concerned only in denying the
recency and foreignness of the God Jahve and
in heightening his claim to the people's devotion.
The other partner would not renounce memories,
so dear to him, of the liberation from Egypt and
the magnificent figure of his leader Moses; and,
indeed, he succeeded in finding a place for the
fact as well as for the man in the new representa-
tion of Jewish early history, in retaining at least
the outer sign of the Moses religion, namely
circumcision, and in insisting on certain restric-
tions in the use of the new divine name. I have
said that the people who insisted on those
demands were the descendants of the Moses
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION IOI
followers, the Levites, separated by a few genera-
tions only from the actual contemporaries and
compatriots of Moses and attached to his memory
by a tradition still green. The poetically elabor-
ated accounts attributed to the Jahvist and to his
later competitor the Elohist, are like gravestones,
under which the truth about those early matters
the nature of the Mosaic religion and the violent
removal of the great man truths withdrawn
from the knowledge of later generations, should,
so to speak, be laid to eternal rest. And if we
have divined aright the course of events, there is
nothing mysterious about them; it might very
well, however, have been the definite end of the
Moses episode in the history of the Jewish people.
The remarkable thing about it is that this was
not so, that the most important effects of that
experience should appear much later and should
in the course of many centuries gradually force
their way to expression. It is not likely that
Jahve was very different in character from the
gods of the neighbouring peoples and tribes; he
wrestled with the other gods, it is true, just as
the tribes fought among themselves, yet we may
assume that a Jahve worshipper of that time
would never have dreamt of doubting the exis-
tence of the gods of Canaan, Moab, Amalek and
so on, any more than he would the existence of
the people who believed in them. The mono-
theistic idea, which had blazed up in Ikhnaton's
IO2 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
time, was again obscured and was to remain in
darkness for a long time to come. On the island
Elephantine, close to the first Nile cataract,
discoveries have yielded the astonishing informa-
tion that a Jewish military colony, settled there
centuries ago, worshipped in their temples besides
their chief god Jahu two female deities, one of
whom was called Anat-Jahu. Those Jews, it is
true, had been separated from the mother country
and had not gone through the same religious
development; the Persian government (in the
fifth century B.C.) communicated to them the
new ceremonial regulations of Jerusalem. 1 Re-
turning to earlier times we may surely say that
Jahve was quite unlike the Mosaic God. A ton
had been a pacifist, like his deputy on earth
or rather his model the Pharaoh Ikhnaton, who
looked on with folded arms as the Empire his
ancestors had won fell to pieces. For a people
that was preparing to conquer new lands by
violence Jahve was certainly better suited. More-
over, what was worthy of honour in the Mosaic
God was beyond the comprehension of a primitive
people.
I have already mentioned and in this I am
supported by the opinion of other workers
that the central fact of the development of Jewish
religion was this: in the course of time Jahve
lost his own character and became more and more
1 Auerbach: W tiste und Gelobtes Land. Bd. II, 1936.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 103
like the old God of Moses, Aton. Differences
remained, it is true, and at first sight they would
seem important; yet they are easy to explain.
Aton had begun his reign in Egypt in a happy
period of security, and even when the Empire
began to shake in its foundations his followers
had been able to turn away from worldly matters
and to continue praising and enjoying his
creations. To the Jewish people fate dealt a
series of severe trials and painful experiences, so
their God became hard, relentless and, as it were,
wrapped in gloom. He retained the character of
an universal God who reigned over all lands and
peoples; ''the fact, however, that his worship had
passed from the Egyptians to the Jews found its
expression in the added doctrine that the Jews
were his chosen people, whose special obligations
would in the end find their special reward. It
might not have been easy for that people to
reconcile their belief in their being preferred to
all others by an all-powerful God with the dire
experiences of their sad fate. But they did not
let doubts assail them, they increased their own
feelings of guilt to silence their mistrust and
perhaps in the end they referred to " God's
unfathomable will," as religious people do to
this day. If there was wonder that he allowed
ever new tyrants to come who subjected and ill-
treated his people the Assyrians, Babylonians,
Persians yet his power was recognized in that
IO4 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
all those wicked enemies got defeated in their
turn and their empires destroyed.
In three important points the later Jewish God
became identical with the old Mosaic God. The
first and decisive point is that he was really
recognized as the only God, beside whom another
god was unthinkable. Ikhnaton's monotheism
was taken seriously by an entire people; indeed,
this people clung to it to such an extent that it
became the principal content of their intellectual
life and displaced all other interests. The people
and the priesthood, now the dominating part of
it, were unanimous on that point; but the priests,
in confining their activities to elaborating the
ceremonial for his worship, found themselves in
opposition to strong tendencies within the people
which endeavoured to revive two other doctrines
of Moses about his God. The prophets' voices
untiringly proclaimed that God disdained cere-
monial and sacrifice and asked nothing but a
belief in Him and a life in truth and justice.
When they praised the simplicity and holiness of
their life in the desert they surely stood under the
influence of Mosaic ideals.
It is time now to raise the question whether
there is any need at all to invoke Moses' influence
on the final shape of the Jewish idea of their
God, whether it is not enough to assume a
spontaneous development to a higher spirituality
during a cultural life extending over many
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 105
centuries. On this possible explanation, which
would put an end to all our guessing, I would
make two comments. First that it does not explain
anything. The same conditions did not lead to
monotheism with the Greek people, who were
surely most gifted, but to a breaking up of poly-
theistic religion and to the beginning of philo-
sophical thought. In Egypt monotheism had
grown as far as we understand its growth as
an ancillary effect of imperialism ; God was the
reflection of a Pharaoh autocratically governing
a great world empire. With the Jews the political
conditions were most unfavourable for a develop-
ment away from the idea of an exclusive national
God towards that of an universal ruler of the
world. Whence then did this tiny and impotent
nation derive the audacity to pass themselves off
for the favourite child of the Sovereign Lord ?
The question of the origin of monotheism among
the Jews would thus remain unanswered or else
one would have to be content with the current
answer that it was the expression of their par-
ticular religious genius. We know that genius
is incomprehensible and unaccountable and it
should therefore not be called upon as an
explanation until every other solution has failed. 1
Furthermore, there is the fact that Jewish
records and history themselves show us the way
1 The same consideration holds good for the remarkable case of
William Shakespeare of Stratford.
IO6 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
by stating emphatically and this time without
contradicting themselves that the idea of an
Only God was given to the people by Moses.
If there is an objection to the trustworthiness of
this statement, it is that the priests in their re-
writing of the Biblical Text as we have it, ascribe
much too much to Moses. Institutions, as well
as ritualistic rules, undoubtedly belonging to
later times, are declared to be Mosaic laws, with
the clear intention of enhancing their authority.
This is certainly a reason for suspicion, yet hardly
enough for us to use. For the deeper motive of
such an exaggeration is clear as daylight. The
priests, in the accounts they present, desired to
establish a continuity between their own times
and the Mosaic period. They attempted to deny
just that which we have recognized to be the
most striking feature of Jewish religious history,
namely, that there was a gap between the
Mosaic law -giving and the later Jewish religion
a gap filled in at first by the worship of Jahve and
only later slowly covered over. Their presenta-
tion denies this sequence of events with all the
means in its power, although its historical cor-
rectness is beyond all doubt, since throughout the
peculiar treatment the Biblical Text has under-
gone there remain more than enough statements
in proof of it. The priests' version had an aim
similar to that of the tendency which made the
new god Jahve the God of the Patriarchs. If we
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 107
take into consideration this motive of the Priestly
Code it is hard not to believe that it was really
Moses who gave his Jews the monotheistic idea.
We should find it the easier to give assent to this
since we are able to say from where the idea
came to Moses something which the Jewish
priesthood had certainly forgotten.
Here, someone might ask, what do we gain by
deriving Jewish monotheism from the Egyptians ?
The problem has thus only been put back a step;
we know no more about the genesis of the mono-
theistic idea. The answer is that it is not a
question of gain, but of research. And perhaps
we shall learn something by elucidating the real
process.
2. Latency Period and Tradition
I thus believe that the idea of an Only God, as
well as the emphasis laid on ethical demands in
the name of that God and the rejection of all
magic ceremonial, were indeed Mosaic doctrines,
which at first found no hearing but came into
their own after a long space of time and finally
prevailed. How is such a delayed effect to be
explained and where do we meet with similar
phenomena ?
Our next reflection tells us that they are often
met with in very different spheres and that they
probably come about in various ways which are
IO8 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
more or less easy to understand. Let us take for
an example the fate of any new scientific theory,
for instance, the Darwinian doctrine of evolution.
At first it meets with hostile rejection and is
violently debated for decades; it takes only one
generation, however, before it is recognized as
a great step towards truth. Darwin himself was
accorded the honour of burial in Westminster
Abbey. Such a case provides no enigma. The
new truth had awakened affective resistances.
These could be sustained by arguments that
opposed the evidence in support of the unpleasant
doctrine. The contest of opinions lasted a certain
time. From the very beginning there were both
adherents and opponents, but the number as
well as the importance of the former steadily
increased until at last they gained the upper
hand. During the whole time of the conflict no
one forgot what was the matter at issue. We are
hardly surprised to find that the whole process
took a considerable time; probably we do not
adequately appreciate the fact that we have here
to do with a manifestation of mass psychology.
There is no difficulty in finding a full analogy to
it in the mental life of an individual. In such a
case a person would hear of something new which,
on the ground of certain evidence, he is asked to
accept as true; yet it contradicts many of his
wishes and offends some of his highly treasured
convictions. He will then hesitate, look for
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION IOQ
arguments to cast doubt on the new material,
and so will struggle for a while until at last he
admits it himself: " all this is true after all,
although I find it hard to accept and it is painful
to have to believe in it." All we learn from this
process is that it needs time for the intellectual
work of the Ego to overcome objections that are
invested by strong feelings. This case, however,
is not very similar to the one we are trying to
elucidate.
The next example we turn to seems to have
still less in common with our problem. It may
happen that someone gets away from, apparently
unharmed, the spot where he has suffered a
shocking accident, for instance a train collision.
In the course of the following weeks, however,
he develops a series of grave psychical and motor
symptoms, which one can ascribe only to his
shock or whatever else happened at the time of
the accident. He has developed a " traumatic
neurosis. 55 This appears quite incomprehensible
and is therefore a novel fact. The time that
elapsed between the accident and the first appear-
ance of the symptoms is called the " incubation
period," a transparent allusion to the pathology
of infectious disease. As an afterthought we
observe that in spite of the fundamental differ-
ence in the two cases, the problem of the trau-
matic neurosis and that of Jewish Monotheism
there is a correspondence in one point. It is
IIO MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
the feature which one might term latency. There
are the best grounds for thinking that in the
history of the Jewish religion there is a long
period after the breaking away from the Moses
religion during which no trace is to be found
of the monotheistic idea, the condemnation of
ceremonial and the emphasis on the ethical side.
Thus we are prepared for the possibility that the
solution of our problem is to be sought in a
special psychological situation.
I have more than once traced the events in
Qades when the two components of the later
Jewish people combined in the acceptance of a
new religion. With those who had been in
Egypt the memory of the Exodus and of the
figure of Moses was still so strong and vivid that
it insisted on being incorporated into any account
of their early history. There might have been
among them grandsons of persons who themselves
had known Moses, and some of them still felt
themselves to be Egyptians and bore Egyptian
names. They had good reasons, however, for
" repressing " the memory of the fate that had
befallen their leader and law-giver. For the
other component of the tribe the leading motive
was to glorify the new God and deny his foreign -
ness. Both parties were equally concerned to
deny that there had been an earlier religion and
especially what it contained. This is how the
first compromise came about, which probably
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION I I I
was soon codified in writing; the people from
Egypt had brought with them the art of writing
and the fondness for writing history. A long
time was to elapse, however, before historians
came to develop an ideal of objective truth. At
first they shaped their accounts according to
their needs and tendencies of the moment, with
an easy conscience, as if they had not yet under-
stood what falsification signified. In consequence,
a difference began to develop between the
written version and the oral report, i.e. the
tradition, of the same subject-matter. What has
been deleted or altered in the written version
might quite well have been preserved uninjured
in the tradition. Tradition was the complement
and at the same time the contradiction of the
written history. It was less subject to distorting
influences perhaps in part entirely free of them
and therefore might be more truthful than the
account set down in writing. Its trustworthiness,
however, was impaired by being vaguer and more
fluid than the written text, being exposed to many
changes and distortions as it was passed on from
one generation to the other by word of mouth.
Such a tradition may have different outcomes.
The most likely event would be for it to be
vanquished by the written version, ousted by it,
until it grows more and more shadowy and at last
is forgotten. Another fate might be that the
tradition itself ends by becoming a written
112 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
version. There are other possibilities which will
be mentioned later.
The phenomenon of the latency period in the
history of the Jewish religion may find its explana-
tion in this : the facts which the so-called official
written history purposely tried to suppress were
in reality never lost. The knowledge of them
survived in traditions which were kept alive
among the people. According to E. Sellin, there
even existed a tradition concerning the end of
Moses which contradicted outright the official
account and came far nearer to the truth. The
same thing, we may suppose, happened with
other beliefs that had apparently found an end
at the same time as Moses, doctrines of the
Mosaic religion that had been unacceptable to
the majority of Moses 5 contemporaries.
Here we meet with a remarkable fact. It is
that these traditions instead of growing weaker
as time went on grew more and more powerful
in the course of centuries, found their way into
the later codifications of the official accounts, and
at last proved themselves strong enough decisively
to influence the thought and activity of the
people. What the conditions were that made
such a development possible seems, however, far
from evident.
This fact is indeed strange, so much so that
we feel justified in examining it afresh. Within
it our problem lies. The Jewish people had
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 113
abandoned the Aton religion which Moses had
given them and had turned to the worship of
another god who differed little from the Baalim
of the neighbouring tribes. All the efforts of
later distorting influences failed to hide this
humiliating fact. Yet the religion of Moses did
not disappear without leaving any trace; a kind
of memory of it had survived, a tradition perhaps
obscured and distorted. It was this tradition of
a great past that continued to. work in the back-
ground, until it slowly gained more and more
power over the mind of the people and at last
succeeded in transforming the God Jahve into
the Mosaic God and in waking to a new life the
religion Moses had instituted centuries ago and
which had later been forsaken. That a dormant
tradition should exert such a powerful influence
on the spiritual life of a people is not a familiar
conception. There we find ourselves in a domain
of mass psychology where we do not feel at home.
We must look around for analogies, for facts of
a similar nature even if in other disciplines. We
shall find them, I am sure.
When the time was ripening for a return of the
religion of Moses, the Greek people possessed an
exceptionally rich treasure of legends and myths
of heroes. It is believed that the ninth or eighth
century B.C. saw the creation of the Homeric
epics which derived their material from this
complex of myths. With our psychological
H
114 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
knowledge of to-day we could long before
Schliemann and Evans have put the question:
whence did the Greeks obtain all this material
of myths and legends which Homer and the great
Attic dramatists transformed into immortal works
of art ? The answer would have had to be : this
people probably passed in its early history through
a period of outward splendour and highly
developed culture which ended in catastrophe
as, indeed, history tells and of which a faint
tradition lived on in these legends. Archaeo-
logical research of our days has confirmed this
suggestion, which if made earlier would surely
have been considered too bold. It has discovered
the evidence of the grandiose Minoan -Mycenaean
culture which had probably already come to
an end on the Greek mainland by 1250 B.C.
The Greek historians of a later period hardly
ever refer to it. There is the remark that there
was a time when the Cretans ruled the sea, a
mention of the name of King Minos and his
palace, and of the labyrinth; but that is all.
Nothing remained of that great time but the
traditions seized upon by the great writers.
Other peoples also possess such folk-epics, for
example, the Indians, Finns and Germans. It
is for the literary historian to investigate whether
the same conditions as with the Greeks applied
there as well. I think that such an investigation
would yield a positive result. The conditions we
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 115
have specified for the origin of folk-epics are as
follows : there exists a period of early history that
immediately afterwards is regarded as eventful,
significant, grandiose and perhaps always heroic;
yet it happened so long ago and belonged to times
so remote that later generations receive intelli-
gence of it only as an obscure and incomplete
tradition. Surprise has been expressed that the
epic as a literary form should have disappeared
in later times. The explanation may be that the
conditions for the production of epics no longer
exist. The old material has been used up and so
far as later events are concerned history has taken
the place of tradition. The bravest heroic deeds
of our days are no longer able to inspire an epic ;
Alexander the Great himself had grounds for his
complaint that he would have no Homer to
celebrate his life.
Remote times have a great attraction some-
times mysteriously so for the imagination. As
often as mankind is dissatisfied with its present
and that happens often enough it harks back
to the past and hopes at last to win belief in the
never -for gotten dream of a Golden Age. 1 Prob-
ably man still stands under the magic spell of
his childhood, which a not unbiassed memory
1 Such a situation forms the basis of Macaulay's " Lays of
Ancient Rome." He assumes the part of a minstrel who, sadly
disappointed with the violent contests of the political parties of
his time, contrasts them with the unity and patriotism of their
forbears.
Il6 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
presents to him as a time of unalloyed bliss.
Incomplete and dim memories of the*past, which
we call tradition, are a great incentive to the
artist, for he is free to fill in the gaps in the
memories according to the behests of his imagina-
tion and to form after his own purpose the image
of the time he has undertaken to reproduce.
One might almost say that the more shadowy
tradition has become the more meet is it for the
poet's use. The value tradition has for poetry,
therefore, need not surprise us, and the analogy
we have found of the dependence of epic poetry
on precise conditions will make us more inclined
to accept the strange suggestion that with the
Jews it was the tradition of Moses which turned
the Jahve worship in the direction of the old
Mosaic religion. The two cases, however, are
very different in other respects. In the one the
result is poetry, in the other a religion, and we
have assumed that the latter under the stimulus
of a tradition was reproduced with a faithfulness
for which, of course, the epic cannot provide a
parallel. Enough remains, therefore, of our
problem to encourage a search for better analogies.
3. The Analogy
The only really satisfactory analogy to the
remarkable process which we have recognized in
the history of Jewish religion is to be found in a
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 1 17
domain apparently remote from our problem. It
is, however, very complete, approximating to
identity. Here again we find the phenomenon
of latency, the appearance of inexplicable
manifestations which call for an explanation,
and the strict condition of an early, and subse-
quently forgotten, experience. Here too we find
the characteristic of compulsiveness, which
overpowering logical thinking strongly engages
the psychical life; it is a trait which was not
concerned in the genesis of the epic.
This analogy is met with in psychopathology,
in the genesis of human neurosis : that is to say,
in a discipline belonging to individual psychology,
whereas religious phenomena must of course be
regarded as a part of mass psychology. We shall
see that this analogy is not so startling as it
appears at first sight; indeed, it is rather in the
nature of an axiom.
The impressions we experienced at an early age
and forgot later, to which I have ascribed such
great importance for the aetiology of the neuroses,
are called traumata. It may remain an open
question whether the aetiology of the neuroses
should in general be regarded as a traumatic one.
The obvious objection is that a trauma is not
always evident in the early history of the neurotic
individual. Often we must be content to say that
there is nothing else but an unusual reaction
to experiences and demands that apply to all
Il8 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
individuals; many people deal with them in
another way which we may term normal. Where
we can find no other explanation than an heredit-
ary and constitutional disposition we are naturally
tempted to say that the neurosis was not suddenly
acquired but slowly developed.
In this connection, however, two points stand
out. The first is that the genesis of the neurosis
always goes back to very early impressions in
childhood. 1 The second is this: it is correct to
say that there are cases which we single out as
" traumatic " ones because the effects unmistak-
ably go back to one or more strong impressions
of this early period. They failed to be disposed
of normally, so that one feels inclined to say : if
this or that had not happened, there would have
been no neurosis. It would be sufficient for our
purposes even if we had to limit the analogy in
question to these traumatic cases. Yet the gap
between the two groups does not seem unbridge-
able. It is quite possible to combine both aetio-
logical conditions in one conception ; all depends
on what is defined as traumatic. If we may
assume that an experience acquires its traumatic
character only in consequence of a quantitative
element that is to say, that if the experience
evokes unusual pathological reactions the fault
1 That is why it is nonsensical to maintain that psycho-analysis
is practised if these early periods of life are excluded from one's
investigation; yet this claim has been made in many quarters.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION Iig
lies in its having made too many demands on the
personality then we can formulate the con-
clusion that with one constitution something
produces a trauma whereas with another it does
not. We then have the conception of a sliding
scale, a so-called complemental series, where two
factors converge to complete the aetiology; a
minus in one factor is compensated by a plus in
the other. Generally the two factors work together
and only at either end of the series can we speak
of a simple motivation. In consequence of this
reasoning we can leave out of account the
difference between traumatic and non -traumatic
aetiology as being unimportant for our analogy.
Despite some risk of repetition, it may be
useful to group together the facts relating to the
important analogy in question. They are as
follows. Our researches have shown that what
we call the phenomena or symptoms of a neurosis
are the consequences of certain experiences and
impressions which, for this very reason, we recog-
nize to be aetiological traumata. We wish to
ascertain, even if only in a rough schematic way,
the characteristics common to these experiences
and to neurotic symptoms.
Let us first consider the former. All these
traumata belong to early childhood, the period
up to about five years. Impressions during the
time when the child begins to speak are found to
be especially interesting. The period between two
ISO MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
and four years is the most important. How soon
after birth this sensitiveness to traumata begins
we are not able to state with any degree of
certainty.
The experiences in question are as a rule
entirely forgotten and remain inaccessible to
memory. They belong to the period of infantile
amnesia which is often interrupted by isolated
fragmentary memories, the so-called " screen -
memories. 55
They concern impressions of a sexual and
aggressive nature and also early injuries to the
self (injuries to narcissism) . We should add that
children at that early age do not yet distinguish
between sexual and purely aggressive actions so
clearly as they do later on; (the " sadistic " mis-
understanding of the sexual act belongs to this
context). It is of course very striking that the
sexual factor should predominate and theory
must take this into account.
These three points early happenings within
the first five years of life, the forgetting, and the
characteristic of sexuality and aggressivity
belong closely together. The traumata are either
bodily experiences or perceptions, especially those
heard or seen; that is to say, they are either
experiences or impressions. What connects the
three points is established theoretically, by
analytic work; this alone can yield a knowledge
of the forgotten experiences, or to put it more
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 121
concretely, though more incorrectly is able to
bring those forgotten experiences back to memory.
The theory says that, contrary to popular
opinion, human sexual life or what later cor-
responds with it shows an early blossoming
which comes to an end at about the age of five.
Then follows the so-called latency period
lasting up to puberty during which there is no
further sexual development; on the contrary,
much that had been achieved undergoes a retro-
gression. The theory is confirmed by anatomical
study of the growth of the internal genitalia;
it suggests that man is derived from a species of
animal that was sexually mature at five years,
and arouses the suspicion that the postponement,
and the beginning twice over, of sexual life has
much to do with the transition to humanity.
Man seems to be the only animal with a latency
period and delayed sexuality. Investigations of
primates, which so far as I know have not been
made, would furnish an invaluable test for this
theory. It must be significant psychologically
that the period of infantile amnesia coincides
with this early blossoming of sexuality. Perhaps
this state of affairs is a necessary condition for the
existence of neurosis, which seems to be a human
privilege, and which in this light appears to be
a survival from primaeval times like certain
parts of our body.
What features are common to all neurotic
122 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
symptoms ? Here we may note two important
points. The effects of the trauma are twofold,
positive and negative. The former are endeavours
to revive the trauma, to remember the forgotten
experience, or, better still, to make it real
to live once more through a repetition of it; if
it was an early affective relationship it is revived
iij an analogous connection with another person.
These endeavours are summed up in the terms
" fixation to the trauma " and " repetition -
compulsion. 53 The effects can be incorporated
into the so-called normal Ego and in the form of
constant tendencies lend to it immutable charac-
ter traits, although or rather because their
real cause, their historical origin, has been for-
gotten. Thus a man who has spent his childhood
in an excessive and since forgotten " mother -
fixation " may all his life seek for a woman on
whom he can be dependent, who will feed and
keep him. A girl who was seduced in early
childhood may orient her later sexual life towards
provoking such assaults over and over again. It
will thus be seen that to understand the problems
of neurosis enables us to penetrate into the secrets
of character formation in general.
The negative reactions pursue the opposite
aim; here nothing is to be remembered or
repeated of the forgotten traumata. They may be
grouped together as defensive reactions. They
express themselves in avoiding issues, a tendency
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 123
which may culminate in an inhibition or phobia.
These negative reactions also contribute con-
siderably to the formation of character. Actually
they represent fixations on the trauma no less
than do the positive reactions, but they follow
the opposite tendency. The symptoms of the
neurosis proper constitute a compromise to
which both the positive and negative effects of
the trauma contribute; sometimes one com-
ponent, sometimes the other, predominates.
These opposite reactions create conflicts which
the subject cannot as a rule resolve.
The second point is this. All these phenomena,
the symptoms as well as the restrictions of per-
sonality and the lasting changes in character,
display the characteristic of compulsiveness; that
is to say, they possess great psychical intensity,
they show a far-reaching independence of psy-
chical processes that are adapted to the demands
of the real world and obey the laws of logical
thinking. They are not influenced by outer
reality or not normally so ; they take no notice of
real things, or the mental equivalents of these, so
that they can easily come into active opposition
to either. They are as a state within the state,
an inaccessible party, useless for the common
weal; yet they can succeed in overcoming the
other, the so-called normal, component and
in forcing it into their service. If this happens
then the sovereignty of an inner psychical reality
124 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
has been established over the reality of the outer
world ;Tthe way to insanity is open. Even if it
does not come to this, the practical importance
of the conflict is immeasurable. The inhibitions,
or even inability to deal with life, of people
dominated by neurosis are a very important
factor in human society. The neurosis may be
regarded as a direct expression of a " fixation "
to an early period of their past.
And how about latency, a question especially
interesting in regard to our analogy ? A trauma
in childhood can be immediately followed by a
neurosis during childhood; this constitutes an
effort of defence accompanied by the formation
of symptoms. The neurosis may last a long time
and cause striking disturbances, or it may remain
latent and be overlooked. As a rule, defence
obtains the upper hand in such a neurosis ; in any
event changes of the personality remain like
scars. A childhood neurosis seldom continues
without an interval into the neurosis of the adult.
Much more often it is succeeded by a time of
undisturbed development, a process made possible
or facilitated by the physiological latency. Only
later does the change appear with which the
neurosis becomes definitely manifest as a delayed
effect of the trauma. This happens either at
puberty or somewhat later. In the first case it
comes about because the instincts strengthened by
physical maturity can again take up the battle
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 125
in which at first they were defeated. In the second
case the neurosis becomes manifest later because
the reactions and changes of the personality
brought about by the defence mechanisms prove
to be an obstacle for the solving of new problems
of life, so that grave conflicts arise between the
demands of the outer world and those of the Ego,
which strives to preserve the organization it had
painfully developed in its defensive struggle. The
phenomenon of a latency in the neurosis between
the first reactions to the trauma and the later
appearance of the illness must be recognized as
typical. The illness may also be regarded as an
attempt at cure, an endeavour to reconcile the
divided Ego divided by the trauma with the
rest and to unite it into a strong whole that will
be fit to cope with the outer world. Yet such an
effort is rarely successful unless analytic help is
sought, and even then not always. Often it ends
in entirely destroying and breaking up the Ego or
in the Ego being overpowered by the portion that
was early split off, and has since been dominated,
by the trauma.
To convince the reader of the truth of our
statements the exhaustive communication of
several neurotic life histories would be necessary.
The difficulty of the subject, however, would lead
to great discursiveness and entirely destroy the
character of this essay. It would become a
treatise on the neuroses and even then would
126 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
enforce conviction only on that minority of
people who have devoted their life's work to the
study and practice of psycho-analysis. Since I am
speaking here to a larger audience I can only
ask the reader to lend a tentative credence to the
abbreviated exposition which he has just read;
I, on my part, agree that he need accept the
deductions which I propose to lay before him
only if the theories on which they are based turn
out to be correct.
Nevertheless I can try to relate one case
which will show clearly many of the peculiari-
ties of neurosis that I have mentioned above.
One case cannot, of course, display everything;
so we shall not be disappointed if its content seems
far away from the analogy we are seeking.
A little boy who, as so often happens in the
families of the petite bourgeoisie, shared his parents 5
bedroom had ample, and even regular, oppor-
tunity for observing sexual intercourse at an age
before he was able to talk. He saw much and
heard still more. In his later neurosis, which
broke out immediately after the time of his first
seminal emission, disturbed sleep was the earliest
and most trying symptom. He became extra-
ordinarily sensitive to nocturnal noises and, if
once awakened, could not get to sleep again.
This disturbance was a true compromise symp-
tom: on the one hand the expression of his
defence against his nocturnal observations, on
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 127
the other hand the endeavour to re-establish the
wakefulness which had enabled him to listen to
those experiences.
Stirred early to aggressive virility by these
observations the boy began to excite his penis by
touch and to make sexual advances towards his
mother, putting himself thus in his father's place
through identification with him. This went on
until at last his mother forbade him to touch his
penis and threatened to tell his father, who would
take the offending organ away. This threat of
castration had a very strong traumatic effect on
the boy. He relinquished his sexual activity and
his character underwent a change. Instead of
identifying himself with his father he began to be
afraid of him, adopted a passive attitude towards
him and by means of occasional disobedience
provoked his father to punish him physically.
This corporal punishment had sexual significance
for him and in that way he could identify
himself with the ill-treated mother. He began
to cling more and more closely to his mother as
if he could not bear to be without her love, even
for a moment, since this constituted a protection
against the danger of castration from his father.
The latency period was spent in this modification
of the (Edipus complex; it remained free from
obvious disturbances. He became a model child
and was successful in school.
So far we have pursued the immediate effect
128 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
of the trauma and confirmed the existence of a
latency period.
The appearance of puberty brought with it the
manifest neurosis and disclosed its second main
symptom, sexual impotency. He had lost all
sensitiveness in his penis, never tried to touch it
and never dared to approach a woman sexually.
His sexual activities remained restricted to
psychical onanism with sadistic -masochistic
phantasies in which it was easy to recognize the
consequence of those early observations of
parental coitus. The thrust of increased virility
that puberty brought with it turned to ferocious
hatred of his father and opposition to him. This
extreme negative relation to his father, which
went as far as injuring his own interests, was the
reason for his failure in life and his conflicts with
the outer world. He could not allow himself to
be successful in his profession, because his father
had forced him to adopt it. He made no friends
and was always on bad terms with his superiors.
Burdened with these symptoms and incapacities
he found at last a wife after his father's death.
Then the core of his character appeared, traits
which made him very difficult to live with. He
developed an absolutely egotistical, despotic and
brutal personality; it was obviously necessary to
him to bully and oppress other people. He was
the exact copy of his father, after the image of
him he had formed in his memory; that is to say,
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 1 29
he revived the father-identification which as a
child he had adopted for sexual motives. In this
part of the neurosis we recognize the return of
the repressed, which together with the immedi-
ate effects of the trauma and the phenomenon of
latency we have described as among the essential
symptoms of a neurosis.
4. Application
Early trauma Defence Latency Outbreak
of the Neurosis Partial return of the repressed
material: this was the formula we drew up for
the development of a neurosis. Now I will
invite the reader to take a step forward and
assume that in the history of the human species
something happened similar to the events in the
life of the individual. That is to say, mankind
as a whole also passed through conflicts of a
sexual -aggressive nature, which left permanent
traces but which were for the most part warded
off and forgotten; later, after a long period of
latency, they came to life again and created
phenomena similar in structure and tendency to
neurotic symptoms.
I have, I believe, divined these processes and
wish to show that their consequences, which
bear a strong resemblance to neurotic symptoms,
are the phenomena of religion. Since it can no
longer be doubted after the discovery of evolution
130 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
that mankind had a pre -history, and since this
history is unknown (that is to say, forgotten),
such a conclusion has almost the significance of
an axiom. If we should learn that the effective
and forgotten traumata relate, here as well as
there, to life in the human family, we should
greet this information as a highly welcome and
unforeseen gift which could not have been
anticipated from the foregoing discussion.
I have already upheld this thesis a quarter of a
century ago, in my book Totem and Taboo (1912),
and need only repeat what I said there. The
argument started from some remarks by Charles
Darwin and embraced a suggestion of Atkinson's.
It says that in primaeval times men lived in small
hordes, each under the domination of a strong
male. When this was is not known; no point of
contact with geological data has been established.
It is likely that mankind was not very far advanced
in the art of speech. An essential part of the
argument is that all primaeval men, including,
therefore, all our ancestors, underwent the fate
I shall now describe.
The story is told in a very condensed way, as
if what in reality took centuries to achieve, and
during that long time was repeated innumerably,
had only happened once. The strong male was
the master and father of the whole horde: un-
limited in his power, which he used brutally. All
females were his property, the wives and daughters
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION
in his own horde as well as perhaps also those
robbed from other hordes. The fate of the sons
was a hard one; if they excited the father's
jealousy they were killed or castrated or driven
out. They were forced to live in small com-
munities and to provide themselves with wives
by robbing them from others. Then one or the
other son might succeed in attaining a situation
similar to that of the father in the original horde.
One favoured position came about in a natural
way: it was that of the youngest son who,
protected by his mother's love, could profit by
his father's advancing years and replace him
after his death. An echo of the expulsion of the
eldest son, as well as of the favoured position of
the youngest, seems to linger in many myths and
fairy tales.
The next decisive step towards changing this
first kind of " social " organization lies in the
following suggestion. The brothers who had
been driven out and lived together in a com-
munity clubbed together, overcame the father
and according to the custom of those times
all partook of his body. This cannibalism need
not shock us; it survived into far later times.
The essential point is, however, that we attribute
to those primaeval people the same feelings and
emotions that we have elucidated in the primitives
of our own times, our children, by psycho-
analytic research. That is to say : they not merely
132 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
hated and feared their father, but also honoured
him as an example to follow; in fact each son
wanted to place himself in his father's position.
The cannibalistic act thus becomes comprehen-
sible as an attempt to assure one's identification
with the father by incorporating a part of him.
It is a reasonable surmise that after the killing
of the father a time followed when the brothers
quarrelled among themselves for the succession,
which each of them wanted to obtain for himself
alone. They came to see that these fights were
as dangerous as they were futile. This hard-won
understanding as well as the memory of the
deed of liberation they had achieved together
and the attachment that had grown up among
them during the time of their exile led at last
to a union among them, a sort of social contract.
Thus there came into being the first form of a
social organization accompanied by a renunciation
sf instinctual gratification; recognition of mutual
Dbligations; institutions declared sacred, which
:ould not be broken in short the beginnings of
morality and law. Each renounced the ideal
3f gaining for himself the position of father, of
possessing his mother or sister. With this the
taboo of incest and the law of exogamy came into
being. A good part of the power which had
become vacant through the father's death passed
to the women; the time of the matriarchate
followed. The memory of the father lived on
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 133
during this time of the " brother horde." A
strong animal, which perhaps at first was also
dreaded, was found as a substitute. Such a
choice may seem very strange to us, but the gulf
which man created later between himself and the
animals did not exist for primitive man. Nor does
it with our children, whose animal phobias we
have been able to explain as dread of the father.
The relationship to the totem animal retained
the original ambivalency of feeling towards
the father. The totem was, on the one hand, the
corporeal ancestor and protecting spirit of the
clan; he was to be revered and protected. On
the other hand, a festival was instituted on which
day the same fate was meted out to him as the
primaeval father had encountered. He was killed
and eaten by all the brothers together. (The
Totem feast, according to Robertson Smith.)
This great day was in reality a feast of triumph to
celebrate the victory of the united sons over the
father.
Where, in this connection, does religion come
in ? Totemism, with its worship of a father substi-
tute, the ambivalency towards the father which
is evidenced by the totem feast, the institution
of remembrance festivals and of laws the breaking
of which is punished by death this totemism,
I conclude, may be regarded as the earliest
appearance of religion in the history of mankind,
and it illustrates the close connection existing
134 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
from the very beginning of time between social
institutions and moral obligations. The further
development of religion can be treated here only
in a very summary fashion. Without a doubt it
proceeded parallel to the cultural development
of mankind and the changes in the structure of
human social institutions.
The next step forward from totemism is the
humanizing of the worshipped being. Human
gods, whose origin from the totem is not veiled,
take the place previously filled by animals.
Either the god is still represented as an animal or
at least he bears the countenance of an animal;
the totem may become the inseparable com-
panion of the god, or, again, the myth makes the
god vanquish just that animal which was nothing
but his predecessor. At one period it is hard to
say when great mother-deities appeared, prob-
ably before the male gods, and they were wor-
shipped beside the latter for a long time to come.
During that time a great social revolution had
taken place. Matriarchy was followed by a
restitution of the patriarchal order. The new
fathers, it is true, never succeeded to the omni-
potence of the primaeval father. There were too
many of them and they lived in larger com-
munities than the original horde had been; they
had to get on with one another and were restricted
by social institutions. Probably the mother
deities were developed when the matriarchy was
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 135
being limited, in order to compensate the
dethroned mothers. The male gods appear at
first as sons by the side of the great mothers; only
later do they clearly assume the features of the
father. These male gods of polytheism mirror the
conditions of patriarchal times. They are numer-
ous, they have to share their authority, and
occasionally they obey a higher god. The next
step, however, leads us to the topic that interests
us here : the return of the one and only father
deity whose power is unlimited.
I must admit that this historical survey leaves
many a gap and in many points needs further
confirmation. Yet whoever declares our recon-
struction of primaeval history to be fantastic
greatly underestimates the richness and the force
of the evidence that has gone to make up this
reconstruction. Large portions of the past, which
are here woven into a whole, are historically
proven or even show their traces to this day, such
as matriarchal right, totemism and male com-
munities. Others have survived in remarkable
replicas. Thus more than one author has been
struck by the close resemblance between the rite
of Christian Communion where the believer
symbolically incorporates the blood and flesh of
his God and the Totem feast, whose inner
meaning it reproduces. Numerous survivals of
our forgotten early history are preserved in the
legends and fairy tales of the peoples, and
136 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
analytic study of the mental life of the child has
yielded an unexpectedly rich return by filling up
gaps in our knowledge of primaeval times. As a
contribution towards an understanding of the
highly important relation between father and
son I need only quote the animal phobias, the
fear of being eaten by the father (which seems so
strange to the grown mind), and the enormous
intensity of the castration complex. There is
nothing in our reconstruction that is invented,
nothing that is not based on good grounds.
Let us suppose that the presentation here given
of primaeval history is on the whole credible.
Then two elements can be recognized in religious
rites and doctrines: on the one hand, fixations
on the old family history and survivals of this;
on the other hand, reproductions of the past and
a return long after of what had been forgotten.
It is the latter element that has until now been
overlooked and therefore not understood. It
will therefore be illustrated here by at least one
impressive example.
It is specially worthy of note that every memory
returning from the forgotten past does so with
great force, produces an incomparably strong
influence on the mass of mankind and puts
forward an irresistible claim to be believed,
against which all logical objections remain
powerless very much like the credo quia
absurdum. This strange characteristic can only be
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 137
understood by comparison with the delusions in a
psychotic case. It has long been recognized that
delusions contain a piece of forgotten truth,
which had at its return to put up with being
distorted and misunderstood, and that the com-
pulsive conviction appertaining to the delusion
emanates from this core of truth and spreads to
the errors that enshroud it. Such a kernel of
truth which we miglit call historical truth must
also be conceded to the doctrines of the various
religions. They are, it is true, imbued with the
character of psychotic symptoms, but as mass
phenomena they have escaped the curse of
isolation.
No other part of religious history has become
so abundantly clear as the establishment of mono-
theism among the Jewish people and its continua-
tion into Christianity if we omit the develop-
ment from the animal totem to the human god
with his regular (animal) companion, a develop-
ment which can be traced without a gap and
readily understood. (Each of the four Christian
evangelists, by the way, still has his favourite
animal.) If we admit for the moment that the
rule of Pharaoh's empire was the external reason
for the appearance of the monotheistic idea, we
see that this idea uprooted from its soil and
transplanted to another people after a long
latency period takes hold of this people, is
treasured by them as their most precious possession
138 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
and for its part keeps this people alive by bestow-
ing on them the pride of being the chosen people.
It is the religion of the primaeval father and the
hope of reward, distinction and finally world
sovereignty, is bound up with it. The last-named
wish -phantasy relinquished long ago by the
Jewish people still survives among their enemies
in their belief in the conspiracy of the " Elders
of Zion." We shall consider in a later chapter
how the special peculiarities of a monotheistic
religion borrowed from Egypt must have worked
on the Jewish people, how it formed their
character for good through the disdaining of
magic and mysticism and encouraging them to
progress in spirituality and sublimations. The
people, happy in their conviction of possessing
truth, overcome by the consciousness of being
the chosen, came to value highly all intellectual
and ethical achievements. I shall also show how
their sad fate, and the disappointments reality had
in store for them, was able to strengthen all these
tendencies. At present, however, we shall follow
their historical development in another direction.
The restoration to the primaeval father of his
historical rights marked a great progress, but
this could not be the end. The other parts of
the prehistoric tragedy also clamoured for recog-
nition. How this process was set into motion it
is not easy to say. It seems that a growing feeling
of guiltiness had seized the Jewish people and
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 139
perhaps the whole of civilization of that time-
as a precursor of the return of the repressed
material. This went on until a member of the
Jewish people, in the guise of a political -religious
agitator, founded a doctrine which together with
another one, the Christian religion separated
from the Jewish one. Paul, a Roman Jew from
Tarsus, seized upon this feeling of guilt and
correctly traced it back to its primaeval source.
This he called original sin ; it was a crime against
God that could be expiated only through death.
Death had come into the world through original
sin. In reality this crime, deserving of death,
had been the murder of the Father who later was
deified. The murderous deed itself, however, was
not remembered ; in its place stood the phantasy
of expiation and that is why this phantasy could
be welcomed in the form of a gospel of salvation
(Evangel). A Son of God, innocent himself,
had sacrificed himself and had thereby taken
over the guilt of the world. It had to be a Son,
for the sin had been murder of the Father.
Probably traditions from Oriental and Greek
mysteries had exerted their influence on the
shaping of this phantasy of salvation. The
essence of it seems to be Paul's own contribution.
He was a man with a gift for religion, in the truest
sense of the phrase. Dark traces of the past lay
in his soul, ready to break through into the
regions of consciousness.
I4O MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
That the Redeemer sacrificed himself as an
innocent man was an obviously tendentious
distortion, difficult to reconcile with logical
thinking. How could a man who was innocent
assume the guilt of the murderer by allowing
himself to be killed'? In historical reality there
was no such contradiction. The " redeemer "
could be no one else but he who was most guilty,
the leader of the brother horde who had over-
powered' the Father. Whether there had been
such a chief rebel and leader must in my
opinion remain uncertain. It is quite possible,
but we must also consider that each member of
the brother horde certainly had the wish to do
the deed by himself and thus to create for himself
a unique position as a substitute for the identifica-
tion with the father which he had to give up when
he was submerged in the community. If there
was no such leader, then Christ was the heir of
an unfulfilled wish -phantasy; if there was such
a leader, then Christ was his successor and
his reincarnation. It is unimportant, however,
whether we have here a phantasy or the return
of a forgotten reality ; in any case, here lies the
origin of the conception of the hero he who
rebels against the father and kills him in some
guise or other. 1 Here we also find the real source
1 Ernest Jones calls my attention to the probability that the
God Mithra, who slays the Bull, represented this leader, the one
who simply gloried in his deed. It is well known how long the
worship of Mithra disputed the final victory with Christianity.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 141
of the " tragic guilt " of the hero in drama a
guilt hard to demonstrate otherwise. We can
scarcely doubt that in Greek tragedy the hero and
the chorus represent this same rebel hero and the
brother horde, and it cannot be without signifi-
cance that in the Middle Ages the theatre began
afresh with the story of the Passion.
I have already mentioned that the Christian
ceremony of Holy Communion, in which the
believer incorporates the flesh and blood of the
Redeemer, repeats the content of the old Totem
feast; it does so, it is true, only in its tender and
adoring sense, not in its aggressive sense. The
ambivalency dominating the father -son relation-
ship, however, shows clearly in the final result
of the religious innovation. Meant to propitiate
the father deity, it ends by his being dethroned
and set aside. The Mosaic religion had been a
Father religion; Christianity became a Son
religion. The old God, the Father, took second
place; Christ, the Son, stood in His stead, just
as in those dark times every son had longed to do.
Paul, by developing the Jewish religion further,
became its destroyer. His success was certainly
mainly due to the fact that through the idea of
salvation he laid the ghost of the feeling of guilt.
It was also due to his giving up the idea of the
chosen people and its visible sign circum-
cision. That is how the new religion could
become all-embracing, universal. Although this
142 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
step might have been determined by Paul's
revengefulness on account of the opposition
which his innovation found among the Jews,
nevertheless one characteristic of the old Aton
religion (universality) was reinstated; a restric-
tion had been abolished which it had acquired
while passing on to a new carrier, the Jewish
people.
In certain respects the new religion was a
cultural regression as compared with the older
Jewish religion; this happens regularly when a
new mass of people of a lower cultural level
effects an invasion or is admitted into an older
culture. Christian religion did not keep to the
lofty heights of spirituality to which the Jewish
religion had soared. The former was no longer
strictly monotheistic, took over from the sur-
rounding peoples numerous symbolical rites, re-
established the great Mother Goddess and found
room for many deities of polytheism in an easily
recognizable disguise though in subordinate
positions. Above all it was not inaccessible as
the Aton religion and the subsequent Mosaic
religion had been to the penetration of super-
stitions, magical and mystical elements which
proved a great hindrance to the spiritual develop-
ment of two following millenia.
The triumph of Christianity was a renewed
victory of the Amon priests over the God of
Ikhnaton after an interval of a millenium and a
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 143
half and over a larger region. And yet Christian-
ity marked a progress in the history of religion :
that is to say, in regard to the return of the
repressed. From now on Jewish religion was, so
to speak, a fossil.
It would be worth while to understand why
the monotheistic idea should make such a deep
impression on just the Jewish people, and why
they adhered to it so tenaciously. I believe
this question can be answered. The great deed
and misdeed of primaeval times, the murder of the
Father, was brought home to the Jews, for fate
decreed that they should repeat it on the person
of Moses, an eminent father substitute. It was
a case of acting instead of remembering, some-
thing which often happens during analytic work
with neurotics. They responded to the doctrine
of Moses which should have been a stimulus to
their memory by denying their act, did not
progress beyond the recognition of the great
Father and barred the passage to the point where
later on Paul started his continuation of primaeval
history. It can scarcely be chance that the violent
death of another great man should become the
starting point for the creation of a new religion
by Paul. This was a man whom a small number
of adherents in Judea believed to be the Son of
God and the promised Messiah, and who later
on took over some of the childhood history that
had been attached to Moses. In reality, however,
144 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
we have hardly more definite knowledge of him
than we have of Moses. We do not know if he
was really the great man whom the Gospels
depict or whether it was not rather the fact and
the circumstances of his death that were the
decisive factor in his achieving importance. Paul,
who became his apostle, did not himself know
him.
The murder of Moses by his people which
Sellin recognized in the traces of tradition and
which, strangely enough, the young Goethe 1 had
assumed without any evidence has thus become
an indispensable part of our reasoning, an impor-
tant link between the forgotten deed of primaeval
times and its subsequent reappearance in the
form of Monotheistic religions, 2 It is an attractive
suggestion that the guilt attached to the murder
of Moses may have been the stimulus for the wish-
phantasy of the Messiah, who was to return and
give to his people salvation and the promised
sovereignty over the world. If Moses was this
first Messiah, Christ became his substitute and
successor. Then Paul could with a certain right
say to the peoples: " See, the Messiah has truly
come. He was indeed murdered before your
eyes." Then also there is some historical truth
in the rebirth of Christ, for he was the resurrected
1 Israel in der Wuste, Bd. VII of the Weimar Edition, S. 170.
2 Compare in this connection the well-known exposition in
Frazer's The Golden Bough, Part III, " The Dying God," 1911.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 145
Moses and the returned primaeval Father of the
primitive horde as well only transfigured and
as a Son in the place of his Father.
The poor Jewish people, who with its usual
stiff-necked obduracy continued to deny the
murder of their " father/ 5 has dearly expiated
this in the course of centuries. Over and over
again they heard the reproach: you killed our
God. And this reproach is true, if rightly
interpreted. It says, in reference to the history of
religion: you won't admit that you murdered
God (the archetype of God, the primaeval Father
and his reincarnations). Something should be
added, namely: " It is true, we did the same
thing, but we admitted it, and since then we have
been purified."
Not all accusations with which antisemitism
pursues the descendants of the Jewish people are
based on such good foundations. There must, of
course, be more than one reason for a phenomenon
of such intensity and lasting strength as the
popular hatred of Jews. A whole series of reasons
can be divined: some of them, which need no
interpretation, arise from obvious considerations;
others lie deeper and spring from secret sources,
which one would regard as the specific motives.
In the first group the most fallacious is the
reproach of their being foreigners, since in many
places nowadays under the sway of antisemitism
the Jews were the oldest constituents of the
K
146 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
population or arrived even before the present in-
habitants. This is so, for example, in the town
of Cologne, where Jews came with the Romans,
before it was colonized by Germanic tribes. Other
grounds for antisemitism are stronger, as for
example, the circumstance that Jews mostly live
as a minority among other peoples, since the
feeling of solidarity of the masses in order to be
complete has need of an animosity against an
outside minority and the numerical weakness of
the minority invites suppression. Two other
peculiarities that the Jews possess, however, are
quite unpardonable. The first is that in many
respects they are different from their " hosts."
Not fundamentally so, since they are not a foreign
Asiatic race as their enemies maintain but
mostly consist of the remnants of Mediterranean
peoples and inherit their culture. Yet they are
different although sometimes it is hard to define
in what respects especially from the Nordic
peoples, and racial intolerance finds stronger
expression strange to say in regard to small
differences than to fundamental ones. The second
peculiarity has an even more pronounced effect.
It is that they defy oppression, that even the most
cruel persecutions have not succeeded in exter-
minating them. On the contrary, they show a
capacity for holding their own in practical life
and, where they are admitted, they make valuable
contributions to the surrounding civilization.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 147
The deeper motives of antisemitism have their
roots in times long past; they come from the
unconscious and I am quite prepared to hear
that what I am going to say will at first appear
incredible. I venture to assert that the jealousy
which the Jews evoked in the other peoples by
maintaining that they were the first-born, favour-
ite child of God the Father has not yet been
overcome by those others, just as if the latter had
given credence to the assumption. Furthermore,
among the customs through which the Jews
marked off their aloof position, that of circum-
cision made a disagreeable, uncanny impression
on others. The explanation probably is that it
reminds them of the dreaded castration idea and
of things in their primaeval past which they would
fain forget. Then there is lastly the most recent
motive of the series. We must not forget that all
the peoples who now excel in the practice of anti-
semitism became Christians only in relatively
recent times, sometimes forced to it by bloody
compulsion. One might say, they all are " badly
christened "; under the thin veneer of Christian-
ity they have remained what their ancestors were,
barbarically polytheistic. They have not yet
overcome their grudge against the new religion
which was forced on them, and they have pro-
jected it on to the source from which Christianity
came to them. The facts that the Gospels tell a
story which is enacted among Jews, and in truth
148 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
treats only of Jews, has facilitated such a projec-
tion. The hatred for Judaism is at bottom hatred
for Christianity, and it is not surprising that in the
German National-Socialist revolution this close
connection of the two monotheistic religions finds
such clear expression in the hostile treatment of
both.
5. Difficulties
Perhaps the preceding chapter has succeeded
in establishing the analogy between neurotic
processes and religious events and thereby in
pointing to the unexpected origin of the latter.
In this translation from individual into mass
psychology two difficulties emerge, different in
nature and importance, which we must now
examine. The first is that we have treated here of
only one case in the rich phenomenology of the
religions and have not thrown any light on the
others. The author regretfully has to admit that
he cannot give more than one sample, that he has
not the expert knowledge necessary to complete
the investigation. This limited knowledge will
allow him perhaps to add that the founding of the
Mohammedan religion seems to him to be an
abbreviated repetition of the Jewish one, in
imitation of which it made its appearance. There
is reason to believe that the Prophet originally
intended to accept the Jewish religion in full for
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 149
himself and his people. The regaining of the one
great primaeval Father produced in the Arabs an
extraordinary advance in self-confidence which
led them to great worldly successes, but which
it is true exhausted itself in these. Allah proved
himself to be much more grateful to his chosen
people than Jahve had in his time. The inner
development of the new religion, however, soon
came to a standstill, perhaps because it lacked
the profundity which in the Jewish religion
resulted from the murder of its founder. The
apparently rationalistic religions of the East are
in essence ancestor cults; therefore they stop
short at an early stage of the reconstruction of
the past. If it is correct that in the primitive
peoples of our time we find as the sole content
:>f their religion the worship of a highest Being,
then we can interpret this only as a withering in
the development of religion, and from here draw
a parallel with the innumerable cases of rudiment-
ary neuroses which we find in clinical psychology.
Why here as well as there no further development
took place we do not understand. We must hold
the individual gifts of these peoples responsible
or it, the direction their activities take and their
general social condition. Besides it is a good
^ule in analytic work to be satisfied with explain -
ng what exists and not to try to explain what has
lot happened.
The second difficulty in this translation into
150 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
mass psychology is much more significant, because
it presents a new problem of a cardinal nature.
The question arises in what form is the active
tradition in the life of the peoples still extant.
There is no such question with individuals, for
here the matter is settled by the existence of
memory traces of the past in the unconscious.
Let us go back to our historical example. The
compromise in Qades, we said, was based on the
continued existence of a powerful tradition
living on in the people who had returned from
Egypt. There is no problem here. We suggested
that such a tradition was maintained by conscious
memory of oral communications which had been
passed on from forbears of only two or three
generations ago. The latter had been participants
and eye-witnesses of the events in question. Can
we believe the same, however, for the later
centuries, namely, that the tradition was always
based on a knowledge, communicated in a normal
way, which had been transmitted from forbear
to descendant ? Who the persons were that
stored such knowledge and passed it on from
mouth to mouth we no longer know, as we did
in the earlier case. According to Sellin, the
tradition of the murder of Moses was always
present among the Priests, until at last it was set
down in writing which alone made it possible
for Sellin to divine it. Yet it could not have been
known to many; it was not general knowledge.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 151
And is this form of transmission enough to explain
its effect ? Can we credit such a knowledge on
the part of a few with the power to seize the
imagination of the masses so lastingly when they
learn of it ? It rather looks as if there were a
something also in the ignorant mass of the people
akin to this knowledge on the part of the few,
which comes forward to meet it as soon as it is
uttered.
It becomes harder still to arrive at a conclusion
when we turn to the analogous case in primaeval
times. In the course of thousands of centuries
it certainly became forgotten that there was a
primaeval father possessing the qualities we men-
tioned, and what fate he met. Nor can we assume
an oral tradition as we did with Moses. In what
sense, therefore, can there be any question of a
tradition ? In what form could it have existed ?
To help readers who are unwilling or un-
prepared to plunge into complicated psycho-
logical matters I shall place the result of the
following investigation at the very beginning. I
hold that the concordance between the individual
and the mass is in this point almost complete.
The masses, too, retain an impression of the past
in unconscious memory traces.
The case of the individual seems to be clear
enough. The memory trace of early events he
has retained, but he has retained it in a special
psychological condition. One can say that the
152 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
individual always knew of them, in the sense that
we know repressed material. We have formed
certain conceptions and they can easily be
proved by analysis of how something gets
forgotten and of how after a time it can come to
light again. The forgotten material is not ex-
tinguished, only " repressed " ; its traces are
extant in the memory in their original freshness,
but they are isolated by " counter-cathexes."
They cannot establish contact with the other
intellectual processes; they are unconscious,
inaccessible to consciousness. It may happen
that certain parts of the repressed material have
escaped this process, have remained accessible
to memory and occasionally reappear in con-
sciousness, but even then they are isolated, a
foreign body without any connection with the
rest of the mind. This may happen, but it need
not happen. Repression may also be complete,
and this is the case we propose to examine.
This repressed material retains its impetus to
penetrate into consciousness. It reaches its aim
when three conditions are present. ( i ) When the
strength of counter-cathexis is diminished by an
illness which acts on the Ego itself, or through a
different distribution of cathexis in the Ego as
happens regularly during sleep. (2) When those
instincts attached to the repressed material become
strengthened. The processes during puberty pro-
vide the best example for this. (3) Whenever
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 153
recent events produce impressions or experi-
ences which are so much like the repressed
material that they have the power to awaken it.
Thus the recent material gets strengthened by the
latent energy of the repressed, and the repressed
material produces its effect behind the recent
material and with its help.
In none of the three cases does the material
that had been repressed succeed in reaching
consciousness unimpeded or without change. It
must always undergo distortions which bear witness
to the not entirely overcome resistance derived
from the counter-cathexis, or else to the modify-
ing influence of a recent experience or to both.
As a distinguishing sign and landmark we have
used the difference between a psychic process
being conscious or unconscious. The repressed
material is unconscious. It would be a cheering
simplification if this sentence could be reversed,
i.e. if the difference of the qualities " conscious "
and " unconscious " were identical with the
difference: belonging to the Ego or repressed.
The fact that our mental life harboured such
isolated and unconscious material would be new
and important enough. In reality things are
more complex. It is true that all repressed
material is unconscious, but not true that every-
thing belonging to the Ego is conscious. We
become aware that being conscious is an
ephemeral quality which adheres to a psychical
154 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
process only temporarily. This is why for our
purposes we must replace "conscious" by "capable
of being conscious," and we call this quality " pre-
conscious." We then say more correctly : the Ego
is essentially preconscious (virtually conscious) ,
but parts of the Ego are unconscious.
This last statement teaches us that the qualities
to which we have attended so far do not suffice
to show us the way in the darkness of mental life.
We must introduce another distinction, one no
longer qualitative, but topographical, and
which lends it a special value genetic at the same
time. Now we distinguish from our mental life
which we see to be an apparatus consisting of
several hierarchies, districts or provinces one
region, which we term the " real Ego," from
another which we call the " Id." The Id is the
older; the Ego has developed out of it through the
influence of the outer world as the bark develops
around a tree. Our primary instincts start in the
Id; all processes in the Id are unconscious. The
Ego corresponds, as we have mentioned, with the
realm of the preconscious; parts of it normally
remain unconscious. The psychical processes in
the " Id " obey quite different laws; their course
and the influence they exert on one another are
different from those that reign in the Ego. It is
the discovery of these differences that has guided
us to our new understanding and lends confirma-
tion to it.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 155
The repressed material must be regarded as
belonging to the Id and obeys its mechanisms;
it differs from it only in respect of its genesis.
This differentiation takes place during the early
period, while the Ego is developing out of the Id.
Then the Ego takes possession of part of the Id
and raises it on to the preconscious level; other
parts are thus not affected and remain in the Id
as the " unconscious " proper. In the further de-
velopment of the Ego, however, certain psychical
impressions and processes in it get shut out by
defensive mechanisms; they are deprived of their
preconscious character, so that they are degraded
again to become integral parts of the Id. This,
therefore, is the " repressed material " in the Id.
As regards the passage between the two mental
provinces we assume, on the one hand, that
unconscious processes in the Id can be raised to
a preconscious level and incorporated into the
Ego, and, on the other hand, that preconscious
material in the Ego can travel the opposite way
and be shifted back into the Id. That later on
another district, the " Super-ego," is delimited
in the Ego, does not concern us in this context.
All this may seem far from simple, but if one
has become familiar with the unaccustomed
topographical conception of the mental apparatus
then there are no particular difficulties. I will
add here that the topography of the psyche I
have here developed has in general nothing to do
156 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
with cerebral anatomy; there is only one point
where it impinges on it. The unsatisfactoriness of
this conception which I perceive as clearly as
anyone has its roots in our complete ignorance
of the dynamic nature of mental processes. We
realise that what distinguishes a conscious idea
from a preconscious one, and this from an un-
conscious one, cannot be anything else but a
modification, or perhaps also another distribution,
of psychic energy. We speak of cathexes and
hypercathexes, but beyond this we lack all
knowledge and even a beginning for a useful
working hypothesis. Of the phenomenon of
consciousness we are at least able to say that it
cleaves originally to perception. All perceptions
which come about through painful, tactile,
auditory or visual stimuli are the more likely to
be conscious. Thought processes, and what may
be analogous to them in the Id, are unconscious
per se, and obtain their entry into consciousness
by their connection, via the function of speech,
with memory traces of perceptions through touch
and ear. In the animal, which lacks speech, these
relationships must be simpler.
The impressions of the early traumata, from
which we started, are either not translated into
the preconscious or they are soon re -directed
into the Id through repression. Their memory-
residues are then unconscious and operate from
the Id. We can believe we can follow their
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 157
further fate distinctly as long as they deal with
personal experiences. A new complication arises,
however, when we become aware that there
probably exists in the mental life of the individual
not only what he has experienced himself, but
also what he brought with him at birth, fragments
of phylogenetic origin, an archaic heritage. Then
the question arises : in what does this inheritance
consist, what does it contain, and what evidence
of it is there ?
The first and most certain answer is that it
consists in certain dispositions, such as all living
beings possess: that is to say, in the ability and
tendency to follow a certain direction of develop-
ment, and to react in a particular way to certain
excitations, impressions and stimuli. Since
experience shows that individuals differ in this
respect, our archaic inheritance includes these
differences; they represent what is recognized
as the constitutional element in the individual.
Since all human beings go through the same
experiences, at least in their earliest years, they
also react to them in the same way, and this is why
the doubt arose whether these reactions with all
their individual differences should not be reckoned
as part of that archaic heritage. This doubt must
be rejected; the fact of this similarity does not
enrich our knowledge of the archaic heritage.
Meanwhile analytic research has yielded several
results which give us food for thought. First of
158 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
all there is the universality of speech symbolism.
Symbolic substitution of one object through
another the same applies to actions our
children are conversant with, and it seems quite
natural to them. We cannot trace the way in
which they learned it and must admit that in
many cases to learn it would be impossible. It
is original knowledge, which the adult later on
forgets. He employs, it is true, the same symbol-
ism in his dreams, but he does not understand
them unless the analyst interprets them for him
and even then he is loath to believe the translation.
When he has used one of the common phrases of
speech in which this symbolism is crystallized, he
has to admit that its true meaning had quite
escaped him. Symbolism even ignores the differ-
ence in languages; investigation would probably
show that it is ubiquitous, the same with all
peoples. Here there seems to be an assured case
of archaic inheritance from the time when
speech was developing, although one might
attempt another explanation: one might say
that these are thought-connections between ideas
which were formed during the historical develop-
ment of speech and which have to be repeated
every time the individual passes through such a
development. This then would be a case of
inheriting a thought-disposition as elsewhere one
inherits an instinctual disposition; so it again
would contribute nothing new to our problem.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 159
Analytic research, however, has also brought
to light other things, which exceed in significance
anything we have so far discussed. In studying
reactions to early traumata we often find to our
surprise that they do not keep strictly to what the
individual himself has experienced, but deviate
from this in a way that would accord much better
with their being reactions to genetic events and
in general can be explained only through the
influence of such. The behaviour of a neurotic
child to his parents when under the influence of
an (Edipus and castration complex is very rich
in such reactions which seem unreasonable in the
individual and can only be understood phylo-
genetically, in relation to the experiences of
earlier generations. It would be amply worth
while to collect and publish the material on which
my remarks are based. In fact it seems to me
convincing enough to allow me to venture
further and assert that the archaic heritage of
mankind includes not only dispositions, but
also ideational contents, memory-traces of the
experiences of former generations. In this way
the extent as well as the significance of the
archaic heritage would be enhanced in a remark-
able degree.
On second thoughts I must admit that I have
argued as if there were no question that there exists
an inheritance of memory-traces of what our
forefathers experienced, quite independently of
l6o MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
direct communication and of the influence of
education by example. When I speak of an old
tradition still alive in a people, of the formation
of a national character, it is such an inherited
tradition and not one carried on by word of
mouth that I have in mind. Or at least I did
not distinguish between the two, and was not
quite clear about what a bold step I took by
neglecting this difference. This state of affairs is
made more difficult, it is true, by the present
attitude of biological science which rejects the
idea of acquired qualities being transmitted to
descendants. I admit, in all modesty, that in
spite of this I cannot picture biological develop-
ment proceeding without taking this factor into
account. The two cases, it is true, are not quite
similar; with the former it is a question of
acquired qualities that are hard to conceive,
with the latter memory-traces of external ex-
pressions, something almost concrete. Probably,
however, we cannot an fond imagine one without
the other. If we accept the continued existence
of such memory-traces in our archaic inheritance
then we have bridged the gap between individual
and mass psychology, and can treat peoples as
we do the individual neurotic. Though we may
admit that for the memory-traces in our archaic
inheritance we have so far no stronger proof
than those remnants of memory evoked by
analytic work, which call for a derivation from
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION l6l
phylogenesis, yet this proof seems to me convinc-
ing enough to postulate such a state of affairs. If
things are different then we are unable to advance
one step further on our way, either in psycho-
analysis or in mass psychology. It is bold, but
inevitable.
In making this postulate we also do something
else. We diminish the over-wide gap human
arrogance in former times created between man
and beast. If the so-called instincts of animals
which from the very beginning allow them to
behave in their new conditions of living as if they
were old and long-established ones if this
instinctual life of animals permits of any explana-
tion at all, it can only be this: that they carry
over into their new existence the experience of
their kind, that is to say, that they have preserved
in their minds memories of what their ancestors
experienced. In the human animal things should
not be fundamentally different. His own archaic
heritage though different in extent and charac-
ter corresponds to the instincts of animals.
After these considerations I have no qualms in
saying that men have always known in this
particular way that once upon a time they had
a primaeval father and killed him.
Two further questions must here be answered.
First under what conditions does such a memory
enter into the archaic inheritance and, secondly,
in what circumstances can it become active, that
1 62 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
is to say, penetrate from its unconscious state in
the Id into consciousness though in an altered
and distorted form ? The answer to the first
question is easy to formulate: it happens when
the experience is important enough or is repeated
often enough or in both cases. With the father-
murder both conditions are fulfilled. To the
second question I would remark: there may be
a number of influences which need not all be
known; a spontaneous course is also possible in
analogy with what happens in some neuroses.
The awakening, however, of the memory-trace
through a recent real repetition of the event is
certainly of decisive importance. The murder of
Moses was such a repetition, and later on the
supposed judicial murder of Christ, so that these
events move into the foreground as causative
agents. It seems as if the genesis of monotheism
would not have been possible without these
events. We are reminded of the words of the
poet:
" All that is to live in endless song
Must in life-time first be drown'd." l
I will conclude with a remark which furnishes
a psychological argument. A tradition based only
on oral communication could not produce the
1 Schiller: The Gods of Greece (English translation by E. A.
Bowring).
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 163
obsessive character which appertains to religious
phenomena. It would be listened to, weighed
and perhaps rejected, just like any other news
from outside ; it would never achieve the privilege
of being freed from the coercion of logical think-
ing. It must first have suffered the fate of
repression, the state of being unconscious, before
it could produce such mighty effects on its
return, and force the masses under its spell, such
as we have observed with astonishment and
hitherto without understanding in religious
tradition. And this is a consideration which tilts
the balance in favour of the belief that things
really happened as I have tried to describe them
or at least very much in that way.
SECTION II
i. Summary
The following part of this essay cannot be sent
forth into the world without lengthy explanations
and apologies. For it is no other than a faithful,
often literal, repetition of the first part save that
some of the critical investigations have been
condensed and that there are additions referring
to the problem of how and why the character of
164 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
the Jewish people developed in the form it did.
I know that this way of presenting my subject is
as ineffectual as it is inartistic. I myself dis-
approve of it wholeheartedly. Why have I not
avoided it ? The answer to this question is easy
for me to find, but rather hard to admit. I have
not been able to efface the traces of the unusual
way in which this book came to be written.
In truth it has been written twice over. The
first time was a few years ago in Vienna, where
I did not believe in the possibility of publishing
it. I decided to put it away, but it haunted me
like an unlaid ghost, and I compromised by
publishing two parts of the book independently
in the periodical Imago. They were the psycho-
analytical starting points of the whole book:
" Moses an Egyptian " and the historical essay
built on it " If Moses was an Egyptian. " The
rest, which might give offence and was danger-
ous namely, the application of my theory to the
genesis of monotheism and my interpretation of
religion I kept back, as I thought, for ever.
Then in March 1938 came the unexpected
German invasion. It forced me to leave my home,
but it also freed me of the fear lest my publishing
the book might cause psycho-analysis to be for-
bidden in a country where its practice was still
allowed. No sooner had I arrived in England
than I found the temptation of making my with-
held knowledge accessible to the world irresistible,
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 165
and so I started to rewrite the third part of my
essay, to follow the two already published. This
naturally necessitated a regrouping of the
material, if only in part. In this secondary re-
editing, however, I did not succeed in fitting the
whole material in. On the other hand, I could
not make up my mind to relinquish the two
former contributions altogether, and this is how
the compromise came about of adding unaltered
a whole piece of the first version to the second, a
device which has the disadvantage of extensive
repetition.
I might, it is true, find comfort in the reflection
that the matter I treated of was so new and
significant quite apart from whether my presen-
tation of it was correct or not that it must count
as only a minor misfortune if people are made to
read about it twice over. There are things that
should be said more than once and cannot be
repeated often enough. It should, however, be
left to the reader's free will whether he wishes to
linger with a subject or return to it. A conclusion
should not be emphasized by the sly device of
dishing up the same subject twice in the same
book. By doing so one proves oneself a clumsy
writer and has to bear the blame for it. However,
the creative power of an author does not, alas,
always follow his good will. A work grows as it
will and sometimes confronts its author as an
independent, even an alien, creation.
1 66 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
2. The People of Israel
If we are quite clear in our minds that a pro-
cedure like the present one to take from the
traditional material what seems useful and to
reject what is unsuitable, and then to put the
individual pieces together according to their
psychological probability does not afford any
security for finding the truth, then one is quite
right to ask why such an attempt was under-
taken. In answer to this I must cite the result.
If we substantially reduce the severe demands
usually made on an historical and psychological
investigation then it might be possible to clear
up problems that have always seemed worthy
of attention and which, in consequence of
recent events, force themselves again on our
observation. We know that of all the peoples
who lived in antiquity in the basin of the Medi-
terranean the Jewish people is perhaps the only
one that still exists in name and probably also
in nature. With an unexampled power of
resistance it has defied misfortune and ill-treat-
ment, developed special character traits and,
incidentally, earned the hearty dislike of all
other peoples. Whence comes this resistance of the
Jew, and how his character is connected with his
fate, are things one would like to understand
better.
We may start from one character trait of the
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 167
Jews which governs their relationship to other
people. There is no doubt that they have a very
good opinion of themselves, think themselves
nobler, on a higher level, superior to the others
from whom they are also separated by many of
their customs. 1 With this they are animated by
a special trust in life, such as is bestowed by the
secret possession of a precious gift ; it is a kind of
optimism. Religious people would call it trust in
God.
We know the reason of this attitude of theirs
and what their precious treasure is. They really
believe themselves to be God's chosen people;
they hold themselves to be specially near to Him,
and this is what makes them proud and confident.
According to trustworthy accounts they behaved
in Hellenistic times as they do to-day. The
Jewish character, therefore, even then was what
it is now, and the Greeks, among whom and
alongside whom they lived, reacted to the Jewish
qualities in the same way as their " hosts " do
to-day. They reacted, so one might think, as if
they too believed in the preference which the
Israelites claimed for themselves. When one is
the declared favourite of the dreaded father one
need not be surprised that the other brothers and
sisters are jealous. What this jealousy can lead to
1 The insult frequently hurled at them in ancient times that they
were lepers (cf. Manetho) must be read as a projection: " They
keep apart from us as if we were lepers."
1 68 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
is exquisitely shown in the Jewish legend of
Joseph and his brethren. The subsequent course
of world history seemed to justify this Jewish
arrogance, for when later on God consented to
send mankind a Messiah and Redeemer He again
chose Him from among the Jewish people. The
other peoples would then have had reason to
say: " Indeed, they were right; they are God's
chosen people. " Instead of which it happened
that the salvation through Jesus Christ brought
on the Jews nothing but a stronger hatred, while
the Jews themselves derived no advantage from
this second proof of being favoured, because they
did not recognize the Redeemer.
On the strength of our previous remarks we
may say that it was the man Moses who stamped
the Jewish people with this trait, one which
became so significant to them for all time. He
enhanced their self-confidence by assuring them
that they were the chosen people of God; he
declared them to be holy, and laid on them the
duty to keep apart from others. Not that the
other peoples on their part lacked self-confidence.
Then, just as now, each nation thought itself
superior to all the others. The self-confidence of
the Jews, however, became through Moses
anchored in religion ; it became a part of their
religious belief. By the particularly close rela-
tionship to their God they acquired a part of His
grandeur. And since we know that behind the
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 169
God who chose the Jews and delivered them from
Egypt stood the man Moses who achieved that
deed, ostensibly at God's command, we venture
to say this: it was one man, the man Moses,
who created the Jews. To him this people owes
its tenacity in supporting life; to him, however,
also much of the hostility which it has met and is
meeting still.
3. The Great Man
How is it possible that one single man can
develop such extraordinary effectiveness, that he
can create out of indifferent individuals and
families one people, can stamp this people with
its definite character and determine its fate for
millenia to come ? Is not such an assumption a
retrogression to the manner of thinking that
produced creation myths and hero worship, to
times in which historical writing exhausted itself
in narrating the dates and life histories of cer-
tain individuals sovereigns or conquerors ? The
inclination of modern times tends rather to trace
back the events of human history to more hidden,
general and impersonal factors the forcible
influence of economic circumstances, changes in
food supply, progress in the use of materials and
tools, migrations caused by increase in population
and change of climate. In these factors individuals
play no other part than that of exponents or
170 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
representatives of mass tendencies which must
come to expression and which found that
expression as it were by chance in such persons.
These are quite legitimate points of view, but
they remind us of a significant discrepancy
between the nature of our thinking apparatus
and the organization of the world which we are
trying to apprehend. Our imperative need for
cause and effect is satisfied when each process
has one demonstrable cause. In reality, outside
us this is hardly so; each event seems to be over-
determined and turns out to be the effect of
several converging causes. Intimidated by the
countless complications of events research takes
the part of one chain of events against another,
stipulates contrasts that do not exist and which
are created merely through tearing apart more
comprehensive relations. 1
If, therefore, the investigation of one particular
case demonstrates the outstanding influence of a
single human personality, our conscience need
not reproach us that through accepting this
conclusion we have dealt a blow at the doctrine
of the significance of those general impersonal
1 1 would guard myself, however, against a possible misunder-
standing. I do not mean to say that the world is so complicated
that every assertion must hit the truth somewhere. No, our
thinking has preserved the liberty of inventing dependencies and
connections that have no equivalent in reality. It obviously prizes
this gift very highly, since it makes such ample use of it inside as
well as outside of science.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 171
factors. In point of fact there is without doubt
room for both. In the genesis of monotheism we
cannot, it is true, point to any other external
factor than those we have already mentioned,
namely, that this development has to do with the
establishing of closer connections among differ-
ent nations and the existence of a great empire.
We will keep, therefore, a place for " the great
man " in the chain, or rather in the network, of
determining causes. It may not be quite useless,
however, to ask under what condition we bestow
this title of honour. We may be surprised to find
that it is not so easy to answer this question. A
first formulation, which would define as great a
human being specially endowed with qualities
we value highly, is obviously in all respects
unsuitable. Beauty, for instance, and muscular
strength much as they may be envied do not
establish a claim to " greatness. 55 There should
perhaps be mental qualities present, psychical
and intellectual distinction. In the latter respect
we have misgivings: a man who has an out-
standing knowledge in one particular field would
not be called a great man without any further
reason. We should certainly not apply the term
to a master of chess or to a virtuoso on a musical
instrument, and not necessarily to a distinguished
artist or a man of science. In such a case we
should be content to say: he is a great writer,
painter, mathematician or physicist, a pioneer in
172 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
this field or that, but we should pause before
pronouncing him a great man. When we declare,
for instance, Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci and
Beethoven, to be great men, then something else
must move us to do so beyond the admiration of
their grandiose creations. If it were not for just
such examples one might very well conceive the
idea that the title " a great man " is reserved by
preference for men of action that is to say,
conquerors, generals and rulers and was in-
tended as a recognition of the greatness of their
achievements and the strength of the influence
that emanated from them. However, this too is
unsatisfying, and is fully contradicted by our
condemnation of so many worthless people of
whom one cannot deny that they exercised a
great influence on their own and later times. Nor
can success be chosen as a distinguishing feature
of greatness if one thinks of the vast number of
great men who, instead of being successful,
perished after being dogged by misfortune.
We should, therefore, tentatively, incline to the
conclusion that it is hardly worth while to search
for an unequivocal definition of the concept:
a great man. It seems to be a rather loosely used
term, one bestowed without due consideration
and given to the supernormal development of
certain human qualities: in doing so we keep
close to the original literal sense of the word
" greatness. 55 We may also remember that it is
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 173
not so much the nature of the great man that
arouses our interest as the question of what are
the qualities by virtue of which he influences his
contemporaries. I propose to shorten this investi-
gation, however, since it threatens to lead us far
from our goal.
Let us agree, therefore, that the great man
influences his contemporaries in two ways:
through his personality and through the idea for
which he stands. This idea may lay stress on an
old group of wishes in the masses, or point to a
new aim for their wishes, or again lure the masses
by other means. Sometimes and this is surely
the more primitive effect the personality alone
exerts its influence and the idea plays a decidedly
subordinate part. Why the great man should
rise to significance at all we have no doubt
whatever. We know that the great majority of
people have a strong need for authority which it
can admire, to which it can submit, and which
dominates and sometimes even ill-treats it. We
have learned from the psychology of the individual
whence comes this need of the masses. It is the
longing for the father that lives in each of us from
his childhood days, for the same father whom the
hero of legend boasts of having overcome. And
now it begins to dawn on us that all the features
with which we furnish the great man are traits
of the father, that in this similarity lies the essence
which so far has eluded us- of the great man.
174 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
The decisiveness of thought, the strength of will,
the forcefulness of his deeds, belong to the picture
of the father; above all other things, however,
the self-reliance and independence of the great
man: his divine conviction of doing the right
thing, which may pass into ruthlessness. He must
be admired, he may be trusted, but one cannot
help being also afraid of him. We should have taken
a cue from the word itself; who else but the father
should have been in childhood the great man ?
Without doubt it must have been a tremendous
father imago that stooped in the person of Moses
to tell the poor Jewish labourers that they were
his dear children. And the conception of a
unique, eternal, omnipotent God could not have
been less overwhelming for them; He who
thought them worthy to make a bond with Him,
promised to take care of them if only they
remained faithful to His worship. Probably they
did not find it easy to separate the image of the
man Moses from that of his God, and their
instinct was right in this, since Moses might very
well have incorporated into the character of his
God some of his own traits, such as his irascibility
and implacability. And when they killed this
great man they only repeated an evil deed which
in primaeval times had been a law directed against
the divine king, and which as we know
derives from a still older prototype. 1
1 Frazer. Loc. cit., p. 192.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 175
When, on the one hand, the figure of the great
man has grown into a divine one, it is time to
remember, on the other hand, that the father
also was once a child. The great religious idea
for which the man Moses stood was, as we have
stated, not his own; he had taken it over from
his King Ikhnaton. And the latter whose
greatness as a founder of religion is proved with-
out a doubt followed perhaps intimations which
through his mother or by other ways had reached
him from the near or the far East.
We cannot trace the network any further. If
the present argument, however, is correct so far,
the idea of monotheism must have returned in
the fashion of a boomerang into the country of
its origin. It appears fruitless to attempt to
ascertain what merit attaches to an individual in
a new idea. Obviously many have taken part in
its development and made contributions to it.
On the other hand, it would be wrong to break
off the chain of causation with Moses and to
neglect what his successors, the Jewish prophets,
achieved. Monotheism had not taken root in
Egypt. The same failure might have happened
in Israel after the people had thrown off the
inconvenient and pretentious religion imposed
on them. From the mass of the Jewish people,
however, there arose again and again men who
lent new colour to the fading tradition, renewed
the admonishments and demands of Moses and
176 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
did not rest until the lost cause was once more
regained. In the constant endeavour of centuries,
and last but not least through two great reforms
the one before, the other after the Babylonian
exile there took place the change of the popular
God Jahve into the God whose worship Moses
had forced upon the Jews. And it is the proof of
a special psychical fitness in the mass which had
become the Jewish people that it could bring
forth so many persons who were ready to take
upon themselves the burden of the Mosaic
religion for the reward of believing that their
people was a chosen one and perhaps for other
benefits of a similar order.
4. The Progress in Spirituality
To achieve lasting psychical effects in a people it
is obviously not sufficient to assure them that they
were specially chosen by God. This assurance
must be proved if they are to attach belief to it
and draw their conclusions from that belief. In
the religion of Moses the exodus served as such
a proof; God, or Moses in his name, did not tire
of citing this proof of favour. The feast of the
Passover was established to keep this event in
mind, or rather an old feast was endowed with
this memory. Yet it was only a memory. The
exodus itself belonged to a dim past. At the
time the signs of God's favour were meagre
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 177
enough; the fate of the people of Israel would
rather indicate his disfavour. Primitive peoples
used to depose or even punish their gods if they
did not fulfil their duty of granting them victory,
fortune and comfort. Kings have often been
treated similarly to gods in every age ; the ancient
identity of king and god, i.e. their common
origin, thus becomes manifest. Modern peoples
also are in the habit of thus getting rid of their
kings if the splendour of their reign is dulled by
defeats accompanied by the loss of land and
money. Why the people of Israel, however,
adhered to their God all the more devotedly the
worse they were treated by Him that is a
question which we must leave open for the
moment.
It may stimulate us to enquire whether the
religion of Moses had given the people nothing
else but an increase in self-confidence through the
consciousness of being " chosen." The next
element is indeed easily found. Their religion
also gave to the Jews a much more grandiose
idea of their God or to express it more soberly
the idea of a more august God. Whoever believed
in this God took part in his greatness, so to speak,
might feel uplifted himself. This may not be
quite obvious to unbelievers, but it may be
illustrated by the simile of the high confidence a
Briton would feel in a foreign land, made unsafe
by revolt, a confidence in which a subject of some
M
178 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
small continental state would be entirely lacking.
The Briton counts on his Government to send a
warship if a hair of his head is touched and also
on the rebels knowing very well that this is so,
while the small state does not even own a warship.
The pride in the greatness of the British Empire
has therefore one of its roots in the consciousness
of the greater security and protection that a
British subject enjoys. The same may be true of
the idea of the great God and since one would
hardly presume to assist God in his conduct of
the world pride in the greatness of God goes
together with that of being " chosen. 55
Among the precepts of Mosaic religion is one
that has more significance than is at first obvious.
It is the prohibition against making an image of
God, which means the compulsion to worship an
invisible God. I surmise that in this point Moses
had surpassed the Aton religion in strictness.
Perhaps he meant to be consistent; his God was
to have neither a name nor a countenance. The
prohibition was perhaps a fresh precaution
against magic malpractices. If this prohibition
was accepted, however, it was bound to exercise
a profound influence. For it signified sub-
ordinating sense perception to an abstract idea;
it was a triumph of spirituality over the senses;
more precisely an instinctual renunciation 1
1 [I use this phrase (Triebverzicht) as an abbreviation for
" renouncing the satisfaction of an urge derived from an instinct ".
Trans.]
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 179
accompanied by its psychologically necessary
consequences.
To make more credible what at first glance
does not appear convincing we must call to mind
other processes of similar character in the develop-
ment of human culture. The earliest among them
and perhaps the most important we can
discern only in dim outline in the obscurity of
primaeval times. Its surprising effects make it
necessary to conclude that it happened. In our
children, in adult neurotics as well as in primitive
people, we find the mental phenomenon which
we have called the belief in the " omnipotence of
thoughts." We judge it to be an over-estimation
of the influence which our mental faculties the
intellectual ones in this case can exert on the
outer world by changing it. All magic, the
predecessor of science, is basically founded on
these premisses. All magic of words belongs here,
as does the conviction of the power connected
with the knowledge and the pronouncing of a
name. We surmise that " omnipotence of
thoughts " was the expression of the pride man-
kind took in the development of language, which
had brought in its train such an extraordinary
increase in the intellectual faculties. There
opened then the new realm of spirituality where
conceptions, memories, and deductions became
of decisive importance, in contrast to the lower
psychical activity which concerned itself with the
l8o MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
immediate perceptions of the sense organs. It
was certainly one of the most important stages on
the way to becoming human.
Another process of later time confronts us in a
much more tangible form. Under the influence
of external conditions which we need not follow
up here and which in part are also not sufficiently
known it happened that the matriarchal struc-
ture of society was replaced by a patriarchal
one. This naturally brought with it a revolution
in the existing state of the law. An echo of this
revolution can still be heard, I think, in the
Oresteia of ^Eschylos. This turning from the
mother to the father, however, signifies above all
a victory of spirituality over the senses, that is to
say a step forward in culture, since maternity is
proved by the senses whereas paternity is a
surmise based on a deduction and a premiss. This
declaration in favour of the thought process, there-
by raising it above sense perception, was proved
to be a step charged with serious consequences.
Some time between the two cases I have
mentioned another event took place which shows
a closer relationship to the ones we have investi-
gated in the history of religion. Man found that
he was faced with the acceptance of " spiritual "
forces, that is to say such forces as cannot be
apprehended by the senses, particularly not by
sight, and yet having undoubted, even extremely
strong, effects. If we may trust to language, it
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION l8l
was the movement of the air that provided the
image of spirituality, since the spirit borrows its
name from the breath of wind (animus, spiritus,
Hebrew: ruach= smoke). The idea of the soul
was thus born as the spiritual principle in the
individual. Observation found the breath of air
again in the human breath which ceases with
death ; even to-day we talk of a dying man
breathing his last. Now the realm of spirits had
opened for man, and he was ready to endow
everything in nature with the soul he had dis-
covered in himself. The whole world became
animated, and science, coming so much later, had
enough to do in disestablishing the former state of
affairs and has not yet finished this task.
Through the Mosaic prohibition God was raised
to a higher level of spirituality; the door was
opened to further changes in the idea of God of
which we shall speak later. At present another of
its effects will occupy us. All such progress in
spirituality results in increasing self-confidence,
in making people proud so that they feel superior
to those who have remained in the bondage of the
senses. We know that Moses had given the Jews
the proud feeling of being God's chosen people;
by de -materialising God a new, valuable con-
tribution was made to the secret treasure of the
people. The Jews preserved their inclination
towards spiritual interests. The political mis-
fortune of the nation taught them to appreciate
1 82 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
the only possession they had retained, their
written records, at its true value. Immediately
after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem
by Titus, Rabbi Jochanaan ben Sakkai asked for
permission to open at Jabne the first school for
the study of the Torah. From now on it was the
Holy Book, and the study of it, that kept the
scattered people together.
So much is generally known and accepted. I
only wished to add that this whole develop-
ment, so characteristic of the Jews, had been
initiated by Moses' prohibition against worship-
ping God in a visible form.
The preference which through two thousand
years the Jews have given to spiritual endeavour
has, of course, had its effect; it has helped to
build a dyke against brutality and the inclination
to violence which are usually found where
athletic development becomes the ideal of the
people. The harmonious development of spiritual
and bodily activity as achieved by the Greeks
was denied to the Jews. In this conflict their
decision was at least made in favour of what is
culturally the more important.
5. Renunciation versus Gratification 1
It is not at all obvious why progress in spiritual-
ity and subordination of the senses should raise
1 (See footnote on p. 178.)
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 183
the self-confidence of a person as well as of a
nation. This seems to presuppose a definite
standard of value and another person or institu-
tion who uses it. For an explanation we turn to
an analogous case in the psychology of the
individual which we have learned to understand.
When the Id makes an instinctual demand of
an erotic or aggressive nature on a human being,
the most simple and natural response for the Ego,
which governs the apparatus for thinking and
muscle innervation, is to satisfy this by an action.
This satisfaction of the instinct is felt as pleasure
by the Ego, just as not satisfying this instinct
would undoubtedly become a source of discom-
fort. Now it may happen that the Ego eschews
satisfaction of the instinct because of external
obstacles, namely, when it realizes that the action
in question would bring in its course serious
danger to the Ego. Such a refraining from satis-
faction, an " instinctual renunciation " because of
external obstacles as we say, in obedience to
the reality-principle is never pleasurable. The
instinctual renunciation would bring about a
lasting painful tension if we did not succeed in
diminishing the strength of the instinctual urge
itself through a displacement of energy. This
instinctual renunciation may also be forced on
us, however, by other motives, which we rightly
call inner ones. In the course of individual
development a part of the inhibiting forces in the
184 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
outer world becomes internalized; a standard
is created in the Ego which opposes the other
faculties by observation, criticism and prohibition.
We call this new standard the super -ego. From now
on the Ego, before undertaking to satisfy the
instincts, has to consider not only the dangers ol
the outer world, but also the objections of the
super-ego, and has therefore more occasion for
refraining from satisfying the instinct. While,
however, instinctual renunciation for external
reasons is only painful, renunciation for internal
reasons, in obedience to the demands of the super-
ego, has another economic effect. It brings
besides the inevitable pain a gain in pleasure to
the Ego as it were, a substitutive satisfaction.
The Ego feels uplifted; it is proud of the renuncia-
tion as of a valuable achievement. We think we
can follow the mechanism of this gain in pleasure.
The super-ego is the successor and representative
of the parents (and educators), who superintended
the actions of the individual in his first years of
life; it perpetuates their functions almost without
a change. It keeps the Ego in lasting dependence
and exercises a steady pressure. The Ego is
concerned, just as it was in childhood, to retain
the love of its master, and it feels his appreciation
as a relief and satisfaction, his reproaches as
pricks of conscience. When the Ego has made
the sacrifice to the super-ego of renouncing an
instinctual satisfaction, it expects to be rewarded
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 185
by being loved all the more. The consciousness
of deserving this love is felt as pride. At a time
when the authority was not yet internalized as
super-ego the relation between the threatened loss
of love and the instinctual demand would have
been the same. A feeling of security and satis-
faction results if out of love to one's parents one
achieves an instinctual renunciation. This good
feeling could acquire the peculiar narcissistic
character of pride only after the authority itself
had become a part of the Ego.
How does this explanation of gaining satisfac-
tion through instinctual renunciation help us in
understanding the processes we wish to study,
namely, the increase of self-confidence that
accompanies progress in spirituality ? Apparently
they help very little, for the circumstances here
are very different. There is no instinctual
renunciation, and there is no second person or
higher standard for whose benefit the sacrifice is
made. The second statement will soon appear
doubtful. One might say: the great man is the
authority for whose sake the effort is made, and
since the great man achieves this because he is a
father substitute we need not be surprised if he
is allotted the role of super -ego in mass psychology.
This would, therefore, hold good for the man
Moses in his relationship to the Jewish people.
In other points, however, there would seem to be
no proper analogy. The progress in spirituality
1 86 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
consists in deciding against the direct sense
perception in favour of the so-called higher
intellectual processes, that is to say, in favour of
memories, reflection and deduction. An example
of this would be the decision that paternity is
more important than maternity, although the
former cannot be proved by the senses as the
latter can. This is why the child has to have the
father's name and inherit after him. Another
example would be: our God is the greatest and
mightiest, although He is invisible like the storm
and the soul. Rejecting a sexual or aggressive
instinctual demand seems to be something very
different from this. In many examples of progress
in spirituality for instance, in the triumph of
father -right we cannot point to the authority
that provides the measure for what is to be valued
the more highly. In this case it cannot be the
father himself, since it is only this progress that
raises him to the rank of an authority. We are,
therefore, confronted with the phenomenon that
during the development of mankind the world of
the senses becomes gradually mastered by spiritu-
ality, and that man feels proud and uplifted by
each such step in progress. One does not know,
however, why this should be so. Still later it
happens that spirituality itself is overpowered by
the altogether mysterious emotional phenomenon
of belief. This is the famous credo quia absurdum,
and whoever has compassed this regards it as
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 187
the highest achievement. Perhaps what is com-
mon to all these psychological situations is some-
thing else. Perhaps man declares simply that
the higher achievement is what is more difficult
to attain, and his pride in it is only narcissism
heightened by his consciousness of having over-
come difficulty.
These considerations are certainly not very
fruitful, and one might think that they have
.nothing to do with our investigation into what
determined the character of the Jewish people.
This would be only to our advantage, but that
this train of thought has all the same to do with
our problem is shown by a fact that will occupy
us later more extensively. The religion that
began with the prohibition against making an
image of its God has developed in the course of
centuries more and more into a religion of
instinctual renunciation. Not that it demands
sexual abstinence; it is content with a consider-
able restriction of sexual freedom. God, however,
becomes completely withdrawn from sexuality
and raised to an ideal of ethical perfection.
Ethics, however, means restriction of instinctual
gratification. The Prophets did not tire of main-
taining that God demands nothing else from his
people but a just and virtuous life: that is to say,
abstention from the gratification of all impulses
that according to our present-day moral stand-
ards are to be condemned as vicious. And even
1 88 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
the exhortation to believe in God seems to recede
in comparison with the seriousness of these
ethical demands. Instinctual renunciation thus
appears to play a prominent part in religion,
although it had not been present in it from the
beginning.
Here is the place to make a statement which
should obviate a misunderstanding. Though it
may seem that instinctual renunciation, and the
ethics based on it, do not belong to the essence of
religion, still they are genetically closely related
to religion. Totemism, the first form of religion
of which we know, contains as an indispensable
part of its system a number of laws and prohibi-
tions which plainly mean nothing else but
instinctual renunciation. There is the worship
of the Totem, which contains the prohibition
against killing or harming it; exogamy, that is
to say, the renunciation of the passionately
desired mothers and sisters of the horde; the
granting of equal rights for all members of the
brother horde, i.e. the restriction of the impulse
to settle their rivalry by brute force. In these
rules we have to discern the first beginnings of a
moral and social order. It does not escape our
notice that here two different motivations come
into play. The first two prohibitions work in the
direction of what the murdered father would
have wished; they, so to speak, perpetuate his
will. The third law, the one giving equal rights
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 1 89
to the brothers, ignores the father's wishes. Its
sense lies in the need of preserving permanently
the new order which was established after the
death of the father. Otherwise reversion to the
former state would have been inevitable. Here
social laws became separated from others which
as we might say originated directly from a
religious context.
In the abbreviated development of the human
individual the most important events of that
process are repeated. Here also it is the parents'
authority essentially that of the all-powerful
father who wields the power of punishment
that demands instinctual renunciation on the
part of the child and determines what is allowed
and what is forbidden. What the child calls
" good " or " naughty " becomes later, when
society and super-ego take the place of the
parents, " good, 33 in the sense of moral, or evil,
virtuous or vicious. But it is still the same thing :
instinctual renunciation through the presence of
the authority which replaced and continued that
of the father.
Our insight into these problems becomes further
deepened when we investigate the strange con-
ception of sanctity. What is it really that appears
" sacred " compared with other things which we
respect highly and admit to be important and signi-
ficant ? On the one hand the connection between
the sacred and the religious is unmistakable;
1 9O MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
it is so stressed as to be obvious. Everything
connected with religion is sacred ; it is the
very core of sanctity. On the other hand our
judgement is disturbed by the numerous attempts
to lay claim to the character of holiness by so
many other things, persons, institutions and
procedures that have little to do with religion.
These endeavours are often plainly tendentious.
Let us proceed from the feature of prohibition
which adheres so closely to religion. The sacred
is obviously something that must not be touched.
A sacred prohibition has a very strong affective
note, but actually it has no rational motivation.
For why should it be such a specially hideous
crime to commit incest with a daughter or sister,
so much more so than any other sexual relations ?
When we ask for an explanation we shall surely
be told that all our feelings cry out against such
a crime. Yet all this means is that the prohibition
is taken to be self-evident, that we do not know
how to explain it.
That such an explanation is illusory can easily
be proved. What is reputed to offend our feelings
used to be a general custom one might say a
sacred tradition in the ruling families of the
Ancient Egyptians and other peoples. It went
without saying that each Pharaoh found his first
and foremost wife in his sister, and the successors
of the Pharaohs, the Greek Ptolemies, did not
hesitate to follow this example. So far we seem
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION
to discern that incest in this case between
brother and sister was a prerogative forbidden
to ordinary mortals and reserved for kings who
represented the gods on earth. The world of the
Greek and Germanic myths also took no exception
to these incestuous relationships. We may surmise
that the anxious concern for " family " in our
higher nobility is a remnant of that old privilege,
and we observe that, as a consequence of inbreed-
ing continued through many generations in the
highest social circles, the crowned heads of
Europe to-day consist in effect of one family.
To point to the incest of gods, kings and heroes
helps to dispose of another attempt at explanation,
namely, the one that would explain the horror of
incest biologically and reduce it to an instinctive
knowledge of the harmfulness of inbreeding. It
is not even certain, however, that there lies any
danger in inbreeding; let alone that primitive
races recognized it and guarded against it. The
uncertainty in determining permitted and pro-
hibited relationships is another argument against
presupposing a " natural feeling " as an original
motive for the horror of incest.
Our reconstruction of pre-history forces another
explanation on us. The law of Exogamy, the
negative expression of which is the fear of incest,
was the will of the father and continued it after
his murder. Hence the strength of its affectivity
and the impossibility of a rational motivation:
1 92 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
in short its sacredness. I should confidently
anticipate that an investigation of all other cases oi
sacred prohibitions would lead to the same result
as that of the horror of incest, namely that what is
sacred was originally nothing but the perpetuated
will of the primaeval father. This would also
elucidate the ambivalence of the word hitherto
inexplicable which expresses the conception of
sacredness. It is the ambivalence which governs
the relationship to the father. " Sacer " does not
only mean " sacred/ 5 " blessed/ 5 but also some-
thing that we can only translate by " accursed/ 5
" worthy of disgust 55 (" auri sacra fames 55 ).
The will of the father, however, was not only
something which one must not touch, which one
had to hold in high honour, but also something
which made one shudder because it necessitated
a painful instinctual renunciation. When we hear
that Moses " sanctified " his people by introduc-
ing the custom of circumcision we now understand
the deep-lying meaning of this pretension. Cir-
cumcision is the symbolical substitute of castra-
tion, a punishment which the primaeval father
dealt his sons long ago out of the fulness of his
power; and whosoever accepted this symbol
showed by so doing that he was ready to submit
to the father's will, although it was at the cost of
a painful sacrifice.
To return to ethics : we may say in conclusion
that a part of its precepts is explained rationally
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 193
by the necessity to mark off the rights of the
community to the individual, those of the
individual to the community, and those of
individuals to one another. What, however,
appears mysterious, grandiose and mystically
self-evident owes its character to its connection
with religion, its origin from the will of the
father.
6. The Truth in Religion
How we who have little belief envy those who
are convinced of the existence of a Supreme
Power, for whom the world holds no problems
because He Himself has created all its institutions !
How comprehensive, exhaustive and final are the
doctrines of the believers compared with the
laboured, poor and patchy attempts at explana-
tion which are the best we can produce. The
Divine Spirit, which in itself is the ideal of ethical
perfection, has planted within the soul of men the
knowledge of this ideal and at the same time the
urge to strive toward it. They feel immediately
what is high and noble and what low and mean.
Their emotional life is measured by the distance
from their ideal. It affords them high gratifica-
tion when they in perihelion, so to speak
come nearer to it; and they are punished by
severe distress when in aphelion they have
N
1 94 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
moved further away from it. All this is so simply
and unshakably established. We can only regret
it if certain experiences of life and observations of
nature have made it impossible to accept the
hypothesis of such a Supreme Being. As if the
world had not enough problems, we are con-
fronted with the task of finding out how those who
have faith in a Divine Being could have acquired
it, and whence this belief derives the enormous
power that enables it to overwhelm Reason and
Science. 1
Let us return to the more modest problem that
has occupied us so far. We set out to explain
whence comes the peculiar character of the Jewish
people which in all probability is what has
enabled that people to survive until to-day. We
found that the man Moses created their character
by giving to them a religion which heightened
their self-confidence to such a degree that they
believed themselves to be superior to all other
peoples. They survived by keeping aloof from
the others. Admixture of blood made little
difference, since what kept them together was
something ideal the possession they had in
common of certain intellectual and emotional
values. The Mosaic religion had this effect
because (i) it allowed the people to share in the
grandeur of its new conception of God, (2)
1 (An allusion to the passage in Faust " Verachte nur Vernunft
und Wissenschaft." Transl.)
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 195
because it maintained that the people had been
" chosen " by this great God and was destined
to enjoy the proofs of his special favour, and
(3) because it forced upon the people a pro-
gress in spirituality which, significant enough
in itself, further opened the way to respect for
intellectual work and to further instinctual
renunciations.
This then is the conclusion we have attained,
but, although I do not wish to retract anything
I have said before, I cannot help feeling that it is
somehow not altogether satisfactory. The cause
does not, so to speak, accord with the result.
The fact we are trying to explain seems to be
incommensurate with everything we adduce by
way of explanation. Is it possible that all our
investigations have so far discovered not the
whole motivation, but only a superficial layer, and
that behind this lies hidden another very signifi-
cant component ? Considering how extraordin-
arily complicated all causation in life and history
is we should have been prepared for something
of that kind.
The path to this deeper motivation starts at a
certain passage in the previous discussion. The
religion of Moses did not achieve its effects
immediately, but in a strangely indirect manner.
This does not mean that it did not itself produce
the effect. It took a long time, many centuries,
to do so; that goes without saying where the
ig6 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
development of a people's character is concerned.
Our modification, however, refers to a fact which
we have taken from the history of Jewish religion
or, if one prefers, introduced into it. We said
that the Jewish people shook off the religion of
Moses after a certain time; whether they did so
completely or whether they retained some of its
precepts we cannot tell. In accepting the sup-
position that during the long period of the fight
for Canaan, and the struggles with the peoples
settled there, the Jahve religion did not sub-
stantially differ from the worship of the other
Baalim, we stand on historical ground, in spite of
all the later tendentious attempts to obscure this
shaming state of affairs. The religion of Moses,
however, had not perished. A sort of memory of
it had survived, obscured and distorted, but
perhaps supported by individual members of the
Priest caste through the ancient scripts. It was
this tradition of a great past that continued to
exert its effect from the background; it slowly
attained more and more power over the minds of
the people, and at last succeeded in changing the
god Jahve into the God of Moses and in bringing
again to life the abandoned religion Moses had
instituted centuries ago.
In an earlier chapter of this book we have dis-
cussed the hypothesis that would seem to be
inevitable if we are to find comprehensible such
an achievement on the part of tradition.
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 197
7. The Return of the Repressed
There are a number of similar processes among
those which the analytic investigation of mental
life has made known to us. Some of them are
termed pathological; others are counted among
the varieties of the normal. This matters little,
however, for the limits between the two are not
strictly defined and the mechanisms are to a
certain extent the same. It is much more impor-
tant whether the changes in question take place
in the ego itself or whether they confront it as
alien; in the latter case they are called symptoms.
From the fullness of the material at my disposal
I will choose cases that concern the formation of
character.
A young girl had developed into the most
decided contrast to her mother; she had culti-
vated all the qualities she missed in her mother
and avoided all those that reminded her of her
mother. We may add that in former years she
had identified herself with her mother like any
other female child and had now come to oppose
this identification energetically. When this girl
married, however, and became a wife and mother
in her turn, we are surprised to find that she
became more and more like the mother towards
whom she felt so inimical, until at last the mother
198 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
identification she had overcome had once more
unmistakably won the day. The same thing
happens with boys, and even the great Goethe,
who in his Sturm und Drang period certainly did
not respect his pedantic and stiff father very
highly, developed in old age traits that belonged
to his father's character. This result will stand
out more strikingly where the contrast between
the two persons is more pronounced. A young
man, whose fate was determined by his having
to grow up with a good-for-nothing father,
developed at first in spite of the father into a
capable, trustworthy and honourable man. In
the prime of life his character changed and from
now on he behaved as if he had taken this same
father as his example. So as not to lose the
connection with our topic we must keep in mind
that at the beginning of such a process there
always exists an identification with the father
from early childhood days. This gets repudiated,
even over -compensated, and in the end again
comes to light.
It has long since become common knowledge
that the experience of the first five years of child-
hood exert a decisive influence on our life, one
which later events oppose in vain. Much could
be said about how these early experiences resist
all efforts of more mature years to modify them,
but this would not be relevant. It may not be so
well known, however, that the strongest obsessive
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 199
influence derives from those experiences which
the child undergoes at a time when we have
reason to believe his psychical apparatus to be
incompletely fitted for accepting them. The fact
itself cannot be doubted, but it seems so strange
that we might try to make it easier to understand
by a simile; the process may be compared to a
photograph, which can be developed and made
into a picture after a short or long interval. Here
I may point out, however, that an imaginative
writer, with the boldness permitted to such
writers, made this disconcerting discovery before
me. E. T. A. Hoffmann used to explain the
wealth of imaginative figures that offered them-
selves to him for his stories by the quickly
changing pictures and impressions he had received
during a journey in a post-chaise, lasting for
several weeks, while he was still a babe at his
mother's breast. What a child has experienced
and not understood by the time he has reached
the age of two he may never again remember,
except in his dreams. Only through psycho-
analytic treatment will he become aware of those
events. At any time in later years, however, they
may break into his life with obsessive impulsive-
ness, direct his actions, force him to like or dislike
people and often decide the choice of his love-
object by a preference that so often cannot be
rationally defended. The two points that touch
on our problem are unmistakable. They are,
2OO MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
first, the remoteness of time, 1 which is considered
here as the really decisive factor, as, for instance,
in the special state of memory that in these
childhood experiences we class as " unconscious/ 5
In this feature we expect to find an analogy with
the state of mind that we ascribe to tradition when
it is active in the mental emotional life of a people.
It was not easy, it is true, to introduce the con-
ception of the unconscious into mass psychology.
Contributions to the phenomena we are looking
for are regularly made by the mechanisms that
lead to a neurosis. Here also the decisive experi-
ences in early childhood exert a lasting influence,
yet in this case the stress falls not on the time, but
on the process opposing that event, the reaction
against it. Schematically expressed it is so. As
a consequence of a certain experience there arises
an instinctual demand which claims satisfaction.
The Ego forgoes this satisfaction, either because it
is paralysed by the excessiveness of the demand
or because it recognizes in it a danger. The first
of these reasons is the original one ; both end in
the avoidance of a dangerous situation. The Ego
guards against this danger by repression. The
1 Here also a poet may speak for us. To explain his attachment
he imagines
Ach du warst in abgelebten Zeiten
Meine Schwester oder meine Frau.
Goethe, Vol. IV of the Weimar Edition, p. 97.
(For in previous lives we both have passed through
You, Love, were my sister or my wife.)
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 201
excitation becomes inhibited in one way or other;
the incitement, with the observations and percep-
tions belonging to it, is forgotten. This, however,
does not bring the process to an end; either the
instinct has kept its strength, or it will regain it
or it is reawakened by a new situation. It renew*
its claim and since the way to normal satisfac-
tion is barred by what we may call the scar tissue
of repression it gains at some weak point ne\\
access to a so-called substitutive satisfaction
which now appears as a symptom, without the
acquiescence and also without the comprehensior
of the ego. All phenomena of symptom -formatior
can be fairly described as " the return of the
repressed." The distinctive character of them
however, lies in the extensive distortion the
returning elements have undergone, comparec
with their original form. Perhaps the objection
will be raised here that in this last group of fact*
we have deviated too much from the similarity
with tradition. We shall feel no regret, however,
if this has led us nearer to the problems oi
instinctual renunciation.
8. The Historical Truth
We have made all these psychological digressions
to make it more credible that the religion oJ
Moses exercised influence on the Jewish people
Only when it had become a tradition. We have
2O2 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
scarcely achieved more than a probability. Yet
let us assume we have succeeded in proving this
conclusively; the impression would still remain
that we had satisfied only the qualitative factor
of our task, not the quantitative as well. To all
matters concerning the creation of a religion
and certainly to that of the Jewish one pertains
something majestic, which has not so far been
covered by our explanations. Some other element
should have part in it: one that has few analogies
and nothing quite like it, something unique and
commensurate with that which has grown out of
it, something like religion itself.
Let us see if we can approach our subject from
the reverse side. We understand that primitive
man needs a God as creator of the world, as head
of his tribe, and as one who takes care of him.
This God takes his place behind the dead fathers
of whom tradition still has something to relate.
Man in later times of our time, for instance
behaves similarly. He also remains infantile and
needs protection, even when he is fully grown;
he feels he cannot relinquish the support of his
God. So much is indisputable, but it is not so
easily to be understood why there must be only
one God, why just the progress from Henotheism
to Monotheism acquires such an overwhelming
significance. It is true, as we have mentioned
before, that the believer participates in the
greatness of his God and the more powerful the
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 203
Jod the surer the protection he can bestow. The
power of a God, however, need not presuppose
his being an only God: many peoples only
glorified their chief god the more if he ruled over
a multitude of inferior gods; he was not the less
great because there were other gods than He.
It also meant sacrificing some of the intimate
relationship if the God became universal and
cared equally for all lands and peoples. One had,
so to speak, to share one's God with strangers and
had to compensate oneself for that by believing
that one was favoured by him. The point could
be made that the conception of an Only God
signifies a step forward in spirituality; this point,
however, cannot be estimated so very highly.
The true believer knows of a way adequately to
fill in this obvious gap in motivation. He says
that the idea of an Only God has had this over-
whelming effect on mankind because it is part of
eternal truth, which, hidden for so long, has at
last come to light and has swept all before it.
We have to admit that at last we have an element
of an order commensurate to the greatness of
the subject as well as to that of the success of its
influence.
I also should like to accept this solution.
However, I have my misgivings. The religious
argument is based on an optimistic and idealistic
premiss. The human intellect has not shown
itself elsewhere to be endowed with a very good
2O4 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
scent for truth, nor has the human mind dis-
played any special readiness to accept truth. On
the contrary, it is the general experience that the
human intellect errs very easily without our
suspecting it at all, and that nothing is more
readily believed than what regardless of the
truth meets our wishes and illusions half-way.
That is why our agreement needs modifying.
I too should credit the believer's solution with
containing the truth; it is not, however, the
material truth, but an historical truth. I would
claim the right to correct a certain distortion
which this truth underwent on its re -emergence.
That is to say : I do not believe that one supreme
great God " exists " to-day, but I believe that in
primaeval times there was one person who must
needs appear gigantic and who, raised to the
status of a deity, returned to the memory of men.
Our supposition was that the religion of Moses
was discarded and partly forgotten and that later
on it forced itself on to the notice of the people
as a tradition. I make the assumption that this
process was the repetition of an earlier one.
When Moses gave to his people the conception
of an Only God it was not an altogether new
idea, for it meant the re -animation of primaeval
experience in the human family that had long
ago faded from the conscious memory of mankind.
The experience was such an important one, how-
ever, and had produced, or at least prepared,
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 205
such far-reaching changes in the life of man, that,
I cannot help thinking, it must have left some
permanent trace in the human soul something
comparable to a tradition.
The psycho-analyses of individuals have taught
us that their earliest impressions, received at a
time when they were hardly able to talk, manifest
themselves later in an obsessive fashion, although
those impressions themselves are not consciously
remembered. We feel that the same must hold
good for the earliest experiences of mankind.
One result of this is the emergence of the con-
ception of one great God. It must be recognized
as a memory, a distorted one, it is true, but never-
theless a memory. It has an obsessive quality;
it simply must be believed. As far as its distortion
goes it may be called a delusion; in so far as it
brings to light something from the past it must
be called truth. The psychiatric delusion also
contains a particle of truth; the patient's con-
viction issues from this and extends to the whole
delusional fabrication surrounding it.
The following pages contain a scarcely altered
repetition of what I said in the first section. In
1912 I tried in my book Totem and Taboo to
reconstruct the ancient situation from which all
these effects issued. In that book I made use of
certain theoretical reflections of Charles Darwin,
Atkinson, and especially Robertson Smith, and
combined them with findings and suggestions
2O6 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
from psycho -analytic practice. From Darwin I
borrowed the hypothesis that men originally
lived in small hordes ; each of the hordes stood
under the rule of an older male, who governed
by brute force, appropriated all the females and
belaboured or killed all the young males, includ-
ing his own sons. From Atkinson I received the
suggestion that this patriarchal system came to an
end through a rebellion of the sons, who united
against the father, overpowered him and together
consumed his body. Following Robertson Smith's
totem theory I suggested that this horde, pre-
viously ruled by the father, was followed by a
totemistic brother clan. In order to be able to
live in peace with one another the victorious
brothers renounced the women for whose sake
they had killed the father, and agreed to practise
exogamy. The power of the father was broken
and the families regulated by matriarchy. The
ambivalence of the sons towards the father
remained in force during the whole further
development. Instead of the father a certain
animal was declared the totem; it stood for their
ancestor and protecting spirit, and no one was
allowed to hurt or kill it. Once a year, however,
the whole clan assembled for a feast at which the
otherwise revered totem was torn to pieces and
eaten. No one was permitted to abstain from this
feast; it was the solemn repetition of the father-
murder, in which social order, moral laws and
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 2O7
religion had had their beginnings. The cor-
respondence of the totem feast (according to
Robertson Smith's description) with the Christian
Communion has struck many authors before
me.
I still adhere to this sequence of thought. I
have often been vehemently reproached for not
changing my opinions in later editions of my
book, since more recent ethnologists have without
exception discarded Robertson Smith's theories
and have in part replaced them by others which
differ extensively. I would reply that these
alleged advances in science are well known to me.
Yet I have riot been convinced either of their
correctness or of Robertson Smith's errors. Con-
tradiction is not always refutation; a new theory
does not necessarily denote progress. Above all,
however, I am not an ethnologist, but a psycho-
analyst. It was my good right to select from
ethnological data what would serve me for my
analytic work. The writings of the highly gifted
Robertson Smith provided me with valuable
points of contact with the psychological material
of analysis and suggestions for the use of it. I
cannot say the same of the work of his opponents.
9. The Historical Development
I cannot reproduce here the contents of Totem
and Taboo, but I must try to account for the long
2O8 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
interval that took place between the events
which we suggested happened in primaeval times
and the victory of monotheism in historical times.
After the combination of brother clan, matriarchy,
exogamy and totemism had been established
there began a development which may be
described as a slow " return of the repressed. 55
The term " repressed 55 is here used not in its
technical sense. Here I mean something past,
vanished and overcome in the life of a people,
which I venture to treat as equivalent to repressed
material in the mental life of the individual. In
what psychological form the past existed during
its period of darkness we cannot as yet tell. It is
not easy to translate the concepts of individual
psychology into mass psychology, and I do not
think that much is to be gained by introducing
the concept of a " collective " unconscious the
content of the unconscious is collective anyhow,
a general possession of mankind. So in the mean-
time the use of analogies must help us out. The
processes we study here in the life of a people are
very similar to those we know from psycho -
pathology, but still they are not quite the same.
We must conclude that the mental residue of those
primaeval times has become a heritage which,
with each new generation, needs only to be
awakened, not to be re-acquired. We may think
here of the example of speech symbolism, which
certainly seems to be inborn. It originates in the
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 2OQ
time of speech development, and it is familiar to
all children without their having been specially
instructed. It is the same in all peoples in spite
of the differences in language. What we may still
lack in certainty we may acquire from other
results of psycho -analytic investigations. We
learn that our children in a number of significant
relationships do not react as their own experiences
would lead us to expect, but instinctively, like
animals; this is explicable only by phylogenetic
inheritance.
The return of the repressed proceeds slowly;
it certainly does not occur spontaneously, but
under the influence of all the changes in the
conditions of life that abound throughout the
history of civilization. I can give here neither a
survey of the conditions on which it depends nor
any more than a scanty enumeration of the stages
in which the return proceeds. The father became
again the head of the family, but he was no
longer omnipotent as the father of the primaeval
horde had been. In clearly recognizable transi-
tional stages the totem animal was ousted by the
god. The god, in human form, still carried at
first the head of an animal ; later on he was wont
to assume the guise of the same animal. Still
later the animal became sacred to him and his
favourite companion or else he was reputed to
have slain the animal, when he added its name
to his own. Between the totem animal and the
2IO MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
god the hero made his appearance; this was
often an early stage of deification. The idea of a
Highest Being seems to have appeared early; at
first it was shadowy and devoid of any connection
with the daily interests of mankind. As the tribes
and peoples were knit together into larger unities
the gods also became organized into families and
hierarchies. Often one of them was elevated to
be the overlord of gods and men. The next step,
to worship only one God, was taken hesitatingly,
and at long last the decision was made to
concede all power to one God only and not to
suffer any other gods beside him. Only then was
the grandeur of the primaeval father restored;
the emotions belonging to him could now be
repeated.
The first effect of the reunion with what men
had long missed and yearned for was overwhelm-
ing and exactly as the tradition of the law -giving
on Mount Sinai depicts it. There was admiration,
awe and gratitude that the people had found
favour in His eyes: the religion of Moses knows of
only these positive feelings towards the Father -
God. The conviction that His power was
irresistible, the subjection to His will, could not
have been more absolute with the helpless,
intimidated son of the father of the horde than
they were here; indeed, they become fully com-
prehensible only by the transformation into the
primitive and infantile milieu. Infantile feelings
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 211
are far more intense and inexhaustibly deep than
are those of adults; only religious ecstasy can
bring back that intensity. Thus a transport of
devotion to God is the first response to the return
of the Great Father.
The direction of this Father religion was thus
fixed for all time, but its development was not
thereby finished. Ambivalency belongs to the
essence of the father -son relationship ; it had to
happen that in the course of time the hostility
should be stirred which in ancient times had
spurred the sons to slay their admired and
dreaded father. In the religion of Moses itself
there was no room for direct expression of the
murderous father-hate. Only a powerful reaction
to it could make its appearance: the conscious-
ness of guilt because of that hostility, the bad
conscience because one had sinned against God
and continued so to sin. This feeling of guiltiness,
which the Prophets incessantly kept alive and
which soon became an integral part of the
religious system itself, had another, superficial,
motivation which cleverly veiled the true origin
of the feeling. The people met with hard times;
the hopes based on the favour of God were slow in
being fulfilled; it became not easy to adhere to
the illusion, cherished above all else, that they
were God's chosen people. If they wished to keep
happiness, then the consciousness of guilt because
they themselves were such sinners offered a
212 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
welcome excuse for God's severity. They deserved
nothing better than to be punished by Him,
because they did not observe the laws; the need
for satisfying this feeling of guilt, which coming
from a much deeper source was insatiable, made
them render their religious precepts ever and ever
more strict, more exacting, but also more petty.
In a new transport of moral asceticism the Jews
imposed on themselves constantly increasing
instinctual renunciation, and thereby reached
at least in doctrine and precepts ethical heights
that had remained inaccessible to the other
peoples of antiquity. Many Jews regard these
aspirations as the second main characteristic, and
the second great achievement, of their religion.
Our investigation is intended to show how it is
connected with the first one, the conception of
the one and only God. The origin, however, of
this ethics in feelings of guilt, due to the repressed
hostility to God, cannot be gainsaid. It bears the
characteristic of being never concluded and never
able to be concluded with which we are familiar
in the reaction -formations of the obsessional
neurosis.
The further development transcends Judaism.
Other elements re-emerging from the drama
enacted around the person of the primaeval
father were in no way to be reconciled with the
Mosaic religion. The consciousness of guilt in
that epoch was no longer restricted to the Jews;
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 213
it had seized all Mediterranean peoples as a
vague discomfort, a premonition of misfortune
the reason for which no one knew. Modern
history speaks of the ageing of antique culture.
I would surmise that it has apprehended only
some of the casual and adjuvant causes for the
mood of dejection then prevailing among the
peoples. The lightening of that oppression
proceeded from the Jews. Although food for the
idea had been provided by many suggestive
hints from various quarters, it was, nevertheless,
in the mind of a Jew, Saul of Tarsus, who as a
Roman citizen was called Paul, that the percep-
tion dawned: "it is because we killed God the
Father that we are so unhappy.' 5 It is quite clear
to us now why he could grasp this truth in no
other form but in the delusional guise of the glad
tidings: " we have been delivered from all guilt
since one of us laid down his life to expiate our
guilt. 55 In this formulation the murder of God
was, of course, not mentioned, but a crime that
had to be expiated by a sacrificial death could
only have been murder. Further, the connection
between the delusion and the historical truth was
established by the assurance that the sacrificial
victim was the Son of God. The strength which
this new faith derived from its source in historical
truth enabled it to overcome all obstacles; in the
place of the enrapturing feeling of being the
chosen ones there came now release through
214 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
salvation.^The fact of the father-murder, how-
ever, had on its return to the memory of mankind
to overcome greater obstacles than the one which
constituted the essence of monotheism; it had to
undergo a more extensive distortion. The un-
mentionable crime was replaced by the tenet of
the somewhat shadowy conception of orig-
inal sin.
Original sin and salvation through sacrificial
death became the basis of the new religion
founded by Paul. The question whether there
was a leader and instigator to the murder among
the horde of brothers who rebelled against the
primaeval father, or whether that figure was
created later by poets who identified themselves
with the hero and was then incorporated into
tradition, must remain unanswered. After the
Christian doctrine had burst the confines of
Judaism, it absorbed constituents from many
other sources, renounced many features of pure
monotheism and adopted in many particulars
the ritual of the other Mediterranean peoples.
It was as if Egypt had come to wreak her venge-
ance on the heirs of Ikhnaton. The way in which
the new religion came to terms with the ancient
ambivalency in the father -son relationship is
noteworthy. Its main doctrine, to be sure, was
the reconciliation with God the Father, the
expiation of the crime committed against Him ;
but the other side of the relationship manifested
HIS PEOPLE AND MONOTHEISTIC RELIGION 215
itself in the Son who had taken the guilt on his
shoulders becoming God himself beside the
Father and in truth in place of the Father.
Originally a Father religion, Christianity became
a Son religion. The fate of having to displace the
Father it could not escape.
Only a part of the Jewish people accepted the
new doctrine. Those who refused to do so are
still called Jews. Through this decision they are
still more sharply separated from the rest of the
world than they were before. They had to suffer
the reproach from the new religious community
which besides Jews included Egyptians, Greeks,
Syrians, Romans and lastly also Teutons that
they had murdered God. In its full form this
reproach would run: " they will not admit that
they killed God, whereas we do and are cleansed
from the guilt of it. 55 Then it is easy to understand
what truth lies behind this reproach. Why the
Jews were unable to participate in the progress
which this confession to the murder of God
betokened (in spite of all its distortion) might
well be the subject of a special investigation.
Through this they have, so to speak, shouldered
a tragic guilt. They have been made to suffer
severely for it.
Our research has perhaps thrown some light
on the question how the Jewish people acquired
the qualities that characterize it. The problem
how they could survive until to-day as an entity
2l6 MOSES AND MONOTHEISM
has not proved so easy to solve. One cannot,
however, reasonably demand or expect exhaustive
answers of such enigmas. All that I can offer is a
simple contribution, and one which should be
appraised with due regard to the critical limita-
tions I have already mentioned.
GLOSSARY
^Etiology causation, particularly of disease.
Affect pertaining to the feeling bases of emotion.
Ambivalence the co-existence of opposed feelings, par-
ticularly love and hate.
Amnesia failure of memory.
Cathexis the process whereby ideas and mental attitudes
are invested with a " charge " of emotion.
Imago a German periodical devoted to the non-medical
application of psycho-analysis.
Instinctual pertaining to instinct.
Masochism the obtaining of sexual pleasure in conjunction
with suffering.
Obsessional Neurosis a neurosis characterized by the
alternation of obsessive (compulsive) ideas and doubts.
Onanism auto-erotic activity, the commonest example
being masturbation.
Phylo-genetic pertaining to racial development.
Reaction -formation development of a character trait that
keeps in check and conceals another one, usually of
the exactly opposite kind.
Regression reversion to an earlier kind of mental life.
Repetition-compulsion the tendency to repeat, which
Freud considers the most fundamental characteristic of
the mind.
Repression the keeping of unacceptable ideas from
consciousness, i.e. in the " unconscious."
Sadism the obtaining of sexual pleasure through the
infliction of suffering.
Super-ego the self-criticizing part of the mind out of
which the conscience develops.
Trayma injury, bodily or mental.
217
INDEX
Aaron: 53.
Abraham: 44, 72.
Adonai: 42, 64, 65.
Adonis: 42.
JEgyptische Religion, Die: 37.
^Eschylos: 180.
^Etiology of the neuroses: 117,
118, 119.
After-life: 33.
Agade: 17.
Akhetaton (see also Ikhnaton) : 39,
40.
Akki: 17.
Alexander the Great: 115.
Allah: 149.
Alphabet, first: 69.
Amalek: 101.
Ambivalency : 211,214.
Amenhotep III: 36, 38.
Amenhotep IV (see also Ikhnaton) :
34, 35, 37, 38, 96-
Amon: 13, 36, 38, 39, 41, 142.
Amon-Re: 32.
Amphion: 17.
Ancestor cults: 149.
Anti-semitism: 145, 146, 147.
Aramcans: 48.
Archaic heritage: 157, 158, 161.
Astruc, Jean: 68.
Athene: 38, 74.
Atkinson: 130, 205, 206.
Aton (or Atum) : 36, 37, 42, 46,
58, 67, 96, 102, 103.
Aton religion: 39, 40, 41, 43, 50,
51, 81, 96, 97, 98, 113, 142, 178,
Auerbach: 68, 102.
Azupirani: 17.
Baalim: 1 13, 196.
Babylon: 17.
Beethoven: 172.
Bes: 32.
Birth: 18, 19.
Breasted,). H.: 13, 14, 35, 37, 38,
41, 81.
Brother clan: 206.
Buonaparte, Napoleon: 14.
Cambridge Ancient History: 35.
Canaan: 44, 48, 61, 62, 74, 78,
79, ?4, 985 99, ioi , 196.
Cannibalism: 131, 132.
Castration: 131, 147, 192.
threat of : 127.
complex: 136, 159.
Cathexis: 156.
Cerebral-anatomy: 156.
Chamisso, Adelbert von: 14.
Chosen people : 211.
Christ: 21, 94, 140, 141, 162.
Christian Communion: 135,141.
Evangelists : 137.
Religion: 142.
Circumcision: 44, 45, 46, 48, 49,
50, 56, 64, 65, 71, 72, 98, 100,
141, 147, 192.
" Collective " unconscious : 208.
Cologne: 146.
Compromise : no.
Compulsiveness : 123.
Counter-cathexis : 152, 153.
Credo quia absurdum: 186.
Crete: 74.
Cyrus: 17, 20.
Darwin, Charles: 108, 130, 205,
206.
Darwinian doctrine: 109.
David, King: 68,69.
Da Vinci, Leonardo: 172.
3*9
22O
INDEX
Dawn of Conscience, The: 13, 14,
35, 37, 4'> 81.
Delusions: 137.
Deuteronomy: 68.
Development of the neuroses : 1 29.
Disraeli, Benjamin: 14.
Distortion : 113,214.
E: 65.
Ebjatar: 68.
Ego: 109, 122, 125, 154, 155, 200.
Egyptian monotheism: 35, 107.
religion: 31, 32, 33, 34,
36,41,43,46.
Egyptian Religion, The: 50.
"Elders of Zion": 138.
Elohim: 65.
Elohist: 68, 101.
Encyclopedia Britannica, The: 68.
Erman, A.: 37, 50.
Ethiopia: 47, 53.
Euphrates: 17.
Evans, A. J.: 74, 114.
Evolution: 108.
Exile: 41, 69.
Exodus: 30, 47, 48, 52, 54, 57, 60,
65, 66, 71, 78, 98, 99,
100, 110, 176.
Book of: 12, 71, 79.
Exogamy: 132, 188, 191, 206,
208.
Exposure myth: 21, 22, 23.
Ezra: 69, 74.
Falcon: 40.
Falsification : 1 1 1 .
Family romance : 1 8.
Father-hate: 211.
-murder: 131, 162, 206,
214.
-religion: 141.
-son-relationship : 211,214.
substitute: 143.
Feelings of guilt: 138,143,212.
Finns: 114.
Fixation: 122, 123, 124, 125, 136.
Flaubert: 80.
Frazer, Sir James: 144.
Galton, A.: 16.
Genesis of the neuroses : 1 1 8.
German National Socialism: 90,
148.
German people: 90,114.
Gilgamesh: 17.
Godfrey: 74.
Gods of Greece, The: 162.
Goethe: 144, 172, 198, 200.
Golden Age, the: 115.
Golden Bough, The : 1 44.
Golden calf, the: 77.
Gosen: 47.
Gospel of salvation: 139.
Greek people : 1 05, 1 1 3, 1 1 4.
Gressmann, Hugo: 59, 65.
Hannibal: 74.
Haremhab: 39, 48, 78, 97.
Hebrews : 48, 80.
Heine: 50.
Heliopolis: 35, 37, 42, 96.
Henotheism: 202.
Heracles: 17.
Heretic King: 35, 97.
Hero: 15, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23,
24, 58, 140, 141, 214.
Herod, King: 21.
Herodotus: 44, 49, 56, 69.
Hexateuch: 65, 68.
History of Egypt, The: 13, 35, 38,
39-
Hoffmann, E. T. A.: 199.
Holy People: 49.
Homer: 114, 115.
Horror of swine: 49.
Horus: 49.
Hosea: 59.
Hyksos period: 47.
Id: 154, 155, 156, 162.
Identification: 127, 129, 140.
Ikhnaton: 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 46,
47> 4**, 50, 5 J > 5*> 76, 81, 9 6 > 97,
98, 101, 104, 142, 175, 214.
Imago: 15, 89, 164.
Imperialism: 36, 95, 105.
Inbreeding: 191.
Incest: 132.
fear of: 191.
taboo of: 190.
India: 50.
Infantile amnesia: 120, 121.
Instinctual renunciation : 178, 183,
185, 187, 189, 192,
2OI, 212.
satisfaction: 184.
INDEX
221
Isaac: 72.
Isis: 49.
Israel in der Wttste: 144.
Israeliten und ihre NachbarMmme,
Die: 55, 56, 57, 58.
Istar: 17.
Italian people: go.
J: 65,68.
Jabne: 182.
Jacob: 44, 72.
Jahu: 102.
Jahve: 37, 55, 57, 58, 61, 63, 64,
65, 66, 67, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77>
80, 81, 82, 98, 100, 102, 103,
104, 105, 106, 113, 116, 149,
176, 196.
Jahvist: 68, 100, 101.
JE: 68.
Jehu: 65.
Jerusalem: 102.
Jethro: 56, 66.
Jewish character: 167,194.
god: 37.
history: 84, 85, 100, 105,
1 06.
monotheism: 42, 51, 95,
107, 109.
people: 20, 21, 24, 29, 31,
49> 5, 59, 60, 61, 62, 73,
76, 79, 83, 99, 101, 102,
103, no, 112, 137, 138,
i39> i43> J 45> 1 66, 1 68,
175, 176, 185, 187, 194,
196, 201, 215.
religion: 31,33,41,485465
82, 83, 106, 1 10, 112,
116, 139, 141, 142, 143,
148, 149, 196, 202.
tradition: 50, 99.
Jochanaan: 65, 74.
Jochanaan ben Sakkai, Rabbi:
182.
Jordan: 60, 61, 66.
Joseph : 1 68.
Josephus, Flavius: 20, 47, 52.
Joshua: 56, 65.
Judisches Lexikon : 12.
Jupiter: 73.
Justice: 81, 82, 104.
Kama: 17.
Knossos: 74.
Latency: no, 112, 117, 121, 124,
125, 127, 128, 129, 137.
Lays of Ancient Rome : 115.
Levites: 20, 62, 63, 64, 79, 84, 101.
Life and Times of Akhnaton, The: 40,
42.
Maat: 32, 35, 81, 82, 96.
Macaulay: 115.
Magic: 81, 179.
Massa: 57.
Matriarchy: 132, 134, 135, 206,
208.
Medes: 20.
Meriba: 57.
Meribat-Qades : 55.
Merneptah stele: 48, 78, 79, 99.
Mesopotamia: 36.
Messiah: 59, 143, 144, 168.
Meyer, E. : 20, 23, 55, 56, 57, 59,
61, 73, 78, 98-
Middle Ages: 141.
Midia: 66.
Midian: 57, 58, 64, 67, 71, 75.
Minoan -Mycenaean culture : 114.
Minos: 74.
Minos, King: 114.
Moab : i o i .
Mohammedan religion: 148.
Monotheism: 24, 31, 34, 35, 36,
37, 42, 51, 80, 92, 95, 96, 101,
104, 105, 107, 109, no, 137,
138, 142, 143, 144, 148, 175,
202, 214.
Mosaic doctrine : 82, 107, 143.
God: 81, 82, 102, 104,
113-
ideals : 1 04.
law: 75, 106.
prohibition : 1 8 1 .
religion: 31, 33, 41, 42,
46, 83, 101, 112, 116,
141, 142, 178, 194, 212.
Mose: 84.
Moses; his name: 12, 14, 23, 31,
97-
his birth: 19-23.
circumcision : 44.
and the Exodus: 47.
and the Jews: 47, 49, 73,
97, 1 68, 169,
and Pharaoh: 46, 50, 52,
53, 76, 97-
222
INDEX
Moses; and God: 53, 177, 210.
and Midian: 56, 57.
murder of: 59, 60, 77, 79,
98, 143, '5, 162.
and Levites: 62, 63.
and breaking of the tables :
77-
character of: 97.
Mosessagen und die Leviten, Die: 23.
Mose und seine Bedeutung fuer die
israelitsch - juedische Religionsge-
schichte: 59.
Mose und seine zeit: 65.
Mother-deities: 134, 142.
Mother-fixation : 122.
Mount Sinai: 53, 54, 66, 210.
Myth: 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21,
22, 23, 29, 46, 52, 54, 56, 72, 73,
95, 113, 114, 131, 134.
Mythus von der Geburt des Helden,
Der: 15, 20.
Narcissism: 120.
Nehemiah: 69, 75.
Neo-Egyptians: 54, 63.
Nile: 12, 20, 50, 102.
Nofertete: 36.
Northern Syria: 42.
Nubia: 36, 40.
(Edipus: 17, 19.
complex: 127, 159.
Omnipotence of thoughts : 1 79.
Omnipotent God : 1 74.
On: 32, 35> 37> 5 1 * 76, 9 6 > 9 8 -
Onanism: 128.
Oresteia, The: 180.
Original Sin: 139.
Osiris: 33, 40, 41, 43.
Palestine: 36, 48, 55, 56, 98, 99.
Paris : 1 7.
Passion, the: 141.
Paul of Tarsus: 139, 141, 143,
144, 214.
Pentateuch: 52, 69.
Perseus: 17.
Persians: 69, 102.
Pharaoh: 20, 21, 34, 36, 46, 52,
53> 57, 77. 79> 9^, 97> 99> I
103, 105, 137, 190.
Phoenicians: 56.
Phylogenetic origin: 157.
Pinchas: 23.
Poetry: 15, 17, 116.
Polytheism: 33, 105, 135, 142,
147.
Preconscious : 152, 154, 155.
Priestly Code : 69, 75, 107.
Primaeval Father horde : 1 34, 1 38,
145, 148, 151, 161, 192, 209, 210.
Progress in spirituality: 138.
Prophets, the: 59, 76, 84, 104,
211.
Ptah: 13.
Ptolemies : 1 90.
Punic: 74.
Qades: 56, 57, 58, 59, 61, 63, 64,
65, 66, 67, 71, 75, 78, 79, 81, 98,
99, 100, no, 150.
Ra-mose (Ramses) : 14.
Rank, Otto: 15, 16, 17, 18, 20.
Re: 3L>, 35,42.
Red Sea: 54.
Redeemer: 140, 141, 168.
Repetition-compulsion: 122.
Repressed Material: 129, 151,
*52, 153, 155-
Romans: 61, 146.
Romulus: 17, 20.
Sacred: 192.
Sargon of Agade : 17.
Schiller: 162.
Schliemann, Heinrich: 114.
School of the Priests : 35, 5 1 .
Screen -memories: 120.
Sellin, E. : 59, 60, 76, 83, 95, 98,
112, 144.
Set: 49.
Shakespeare, William: 105.
Shaw, George Bernard: 89.
Shechem, Prince of: 45.
Shittim: 60.
Silo: 23.
Sinai: 55, 98.
Sinai-Horeb: 55, 66, 75.
Smith, Robertson: 133, 205, 206,
207.
Son religion: 141.
Soviet Russia: 89.
Sprache des Pentateuch in ihren
Beziehungen zum Aegyptischen : 6*-
69.
Sublimation: 138.
INDEX
223
Substitutive satisfaction : 1 84, 20 1 .
Sumerians: 44.
Sun God: 32, 35, 36, 37, 40, 96,
^98.
Sun Temple: 35.
Super-Ego: 155, 184, 185, 189.
Symbolism: 158.
Symptom formation: 201.
Syria: 36, 42, 99.
Taboo: 64, 74, 132.
of incest: 190.
Talmudists: 30.
Telephos: 17.
Tell-el-Amarna: 39, 97.
Temple: 69.
Ten Commandments: 66.
Theatre, the: 141.
Thebes: 32, 36, 38, 39, 42.
Thothmes: 97.
Ill: 36-
Titus: 182.
Topography of the psyche: 155.
Torah: 182.
Totem and Taboo: 85, 94, 130, 205,
207.
Totem animal: 133, 209.
Totemism: 32, 133, 134, 135, 141,
1 88, 206, 207, 208, 209.
Tradition: 12, 62, 67, 71, 82, 83,
85, in, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116,
150, 151, 160, 201, 214.
Tragic guilt: 140, 141, 215.
Traumata: 84, 109, 117, 119, 120,
122, 123, 124, 125, 127, 128,
129, 130, 159.
Turk: 49.
Tutankhaton: 39.
Twelve tribes: 80.
Unconscious: 153, 154, 155, 200.
memory traces : 151.
Universal god: 37, 96, 103.
Universalism: 36, 142.
Vestal: 17.
Volcano god: 55, 65, 66, 73, 74,
89.
Volz, Paul: 84.
Weigall, A. : 40, 42.
Westminster Abbey: 108.
Wish-phantasy: 138, 140, 144.
Womb: 18.
Worship of the Sun: 43.
Wuste und Gelobtes Land: 68, 102.
Yahuda, A. S.: 63, 69.
Zethos: 17.
Zeus: 38, 74.